Galaxy Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a galaxy tattoo means

The word is Greek for milky. The Greeks called the pale band across the night sky galaxias kyklos, the milky circle, and told how the infant Heracles was put to Hera's breast while she slept; when she woke and pushed him off, her milk sprayed across the heavens. For most of history nobody knew that band was one galaxy among countless others; it simply stood for distance.

On skin a galaxy is usually about scale, and wearers take it two opposite ways. Some want the comfort of being small, the feeling Carl Sagan gave words to when Voyager 1 photographed Earth from about six billion kilometres in 1990 and he named the picture the Pale Blue Dot. Others mean that one person holds something that large. His line in Cosmos that we are made of star-stuff is literal: the carbon and oxygen in a body were forged inside stars, and much of its iron was scattered by stars that exploded.

Most of this page uses the galaxy as a filling rather than a subject. A humpback whale swims with a spiral inside its silhouette, an anatomical heart glows magenta and violet, a bear walks with a window into the night cut through its flank, a guitar's sound hole opens onto stars, and the manes of a unicorn and a lion unwind into spiral arms. Each time the outline is the thing you are and the space is what it carries. The corked bottle turns that round: a universe kept small enough to put on a shelf.

East Asia reads the Milky Way as a river. In the story told at Qixi in China and Tanabata in Japan, the weaver girl and the cowherd, the stars Vega and Altair, live on opposite banks of the River of Heaven and may cross only on the seventh day of the seventh month, so a galaxy between two initials borrows a love kept across distance.

Where the design comes from

Nobody saw the shape of a galaxy until the nineteenth century. Galileo turned a telescope on the Milky Way in 1610 and found it made of faint stars beyond counting. The Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi had described Andromeda as a small cloud in his Book of Fixed Stars around 964, and a cloud it stayed until 1845, when William Parsons, Earl of Rosse, turned his 72-inch telescope at Birr Castle in Ireland on the Whirlpool and sketched the first spiral anyone had seen. Whether those spirals sat inside our galaxy or far beyond it was argued by Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 and settled in 1923, when Edwin Hubble found a Cepheid variable star in Andromeda and its distance put the whole spiral outside.

Choosing yours

• Choose a galaxy or space as a filling. A real one stands alone and wants a field its own shape: Andromeda, tilted steeply with its two companions, is a long ellipse for a forearm, the face-on dotwork spiral a round one for a shoulder blade. The geometric spiral leans on a fact about real ones: their arms run close to logarithmic spirals, the curve that keeps its shape as it grows.
• Keep the stars as skin. The blackwork disc and its heavy crescent moon leave every star unshaded inside solid black shading, and that version stays bright; white ink dotted over colour drifts toward yellow or the skin tone within a few years, and a nebula that relied on it dulls to a flat violet patch.
• Violet is a convention, not a photograph. A real spiral in natural colour has a yellowish core of old stars, bluish arms of young ones and pink knots where hydrogen glows.

Common questions