Demon Tattoo Ideas: Hannya, Oni and Devils

What a demon tattoo means

Start with the hannya, the face most people mean and most often misread. In Noh theatre it is worn by a woman whose jealousy has made her a demon: two horns, gold eyes, a mouth split almost to the ears. Tipped down under the stage lights the carved face looks grief-stricken, and tipped up it looks enraged, and a well-made mask does both. On skin it is less a monster than a warning about what a feeling can do to the person who has it.

An oni is a separate creature, from folk belief rather than the stage. It is the ogre of Japanese folklore: red or blue skin, horns, fangs, a tiger-skin loincloth and an iron club called a kanabō, carried so reliably that "an iron club for an oni" is a proverb for making the strong stronger. The usual explanation for the ox horns and the tiger skin is direction, since the unlucky north-east, the demon gate, was ushitora in the old compass, ox and tiger. Every February at Setsubun families throw beans and shout "oni wa soto", demons out, yet oni faces also sit on temple roofs as onigawara tiles, guarding the building. An oni tattoo can mean the threat or the guard.

A Western demon is a third idea. Christianity made demons fallen angels, and the horned, bat-winged figure is the shape they settled into in late medieval painting. People wearing one now rarely mean the devil. They mean their own demons, an addiction, a depression, a temper, drawn and put where they can be watched rather than left to work unseen.

The Greek word pulls the other way entirely. A daimon was a spirit attached to a person and not necessarily an evil one, and Socrates spoke of an inner voice that warned him off mistakes and never urged him on.

Where the design comes from

The hannya belongs to Noh, the masked drama given its classical shape by Kan'ami and his son Zeami in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It appears in Aoi no Ue, where the jealous spirit of Lady Rokujō from The Tale of Genji torments her rival, and in Dōjōji, where a woman spurned by a monk becomes a serpent and burns him inside a temple bell. Irezumi borrowed it from the stage and from woodblock prints, and it became a standard face of the Japanese bodysuit.

Choosing yours

• Tell the faces apart first. A hannya has two horns, gold eyes and a wide mouth: a person changed by feeling. An oni has one horn or two, a heavy brow and often its club: a force. Raijin with his drums and the long-nosed tengu on this page are neither, one a thunder god and the other a mountain spirit.
• Choose the hannya's colour deliberately: Noh uses a pale mask for a refined woman and the deepest red for one wholly turned demon. On a Western head the horns do the work, and ram horns, as on the fine-line head here, pull it toward the devil.

Common questions