Crucifix Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a crucifix tattoo means

The difference from a plain cross is exact. A Latin cross is the shape alone; a crucifix is that shape with the corpus, Latin for body, fixed to it. The empty cross looks past the death to Easter morning, while the crucifix holds the viewer at the hour of dying and asks them to see the cost rather than skip to the ending.

The churches handle it differently. The Catholic Church requires a cross bearing the figure of Christ on or near the altar at every Mass, and the rosary ends in one. Orthodox Christians prefer the figure painted or in low relief rather than carved in the round. Lutherans kept crucifixes after the Reformation, but Reformed, Baptist and most evangelical churches display the empty cross instead, so a crucifix on skin is usually taken for a Catholic or Orthodox sign.

The pose tells you the period. Christ upright with open eyes and his feet side by side on a footrest is the older triumphant type, the Christus triumphans of Byzantine icons and Romanesque painted crosses such as the San Damiano cross in Assisi, and the red and gold icon crucifix here follows it. The head fallen to one shoulder, the body sagging and the feet crossed under one nail is the suffering type, the Christus patiens, which took over in the West from the thirteenth century and is the one most crucifixes on this page draw.

Respect turns on use more than on drawing. An upside-down crucifix, body and all, is read almost everywhere as an attack on the faith. Many Catholic and Orthodox believers are uneasy with one on the feet or below the waist, or worn purely as a fashion piece, while a crucifix hanging from a rosary under a mother's name, as in two older designs here, sits well inside the devotional tradition.

Where the design comes from

Christians avoided picturing the crucifixion for about four hundred years. The earliest surviving images, an ivory panel of around 420 to 430 now in the British Museum and the carved cypress doors of Santa Sabina in Rome, both show Christ alive with his eyes open. In 692 the Quinisext Council at Constantinople ruled that Christ should be shown in human form rather than as a lamb. The Gero Cross in Cologne Cathedral, carved in oak around 970, is the oldest large sculpted crucifix north of the Alps, and its Christ already hangs dead with closed eyes. In Ireland the corpus went into stone: Muiredach's Cross at Monasterboice, from the tenth century, has the Crucifixion at the heart of its ring, the model for the Celtic high-cross crucifix among these designs.

Choosing yours

• Choose which Christ before choosing a style: upright and alive in the Byzantine manner, or bowed and dead as in Western art since the Gothic period, the default if you do not say.
• The corpus sets the minimum size. A figure under about 4 cm tall loses its arms into the crossbeam and its feet into the upright, so the smallest designs here are the rosary crucifix, where the body is barely a mark, and the blackwork one, which cuts the body out as white negative space so it survives as a silhouette.
• Decide what goes above the head. The titulus, the board Pilate had fixed to the cross, carries INRI on most Western crucifixes, the Latin initials of Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews; two designs here leave it blank, so the letters can go in or stay out.

Common questions