Gemini Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a gemini tattoo means

Gemini is the sign of two minds in one person. Astrology gives it curiosity, quick talk, changeable interests and a restlessness that its admirers call range and its critics call inconsistency. Most Gemini tattoos are about carrying both sides without apology. Plenty are about an actual twin, a sibling, or the other half of a pair, and the myth supports that reading better than the horoscope does.

In the sky the twins are two roughly parallel lines of stars standing side by side, heads together at one end and feet at the other. The heads are Castor and Pollux, close enough together to pick out at a glance above and to the left of Orion on a winter evening. Pollux is an orange giant and the brighter of the pair, even though Johann Bayer lettered Castor alpha in his atlas of 1603; Castor is white, and through a telescope it turns out to be six stars bound together in three pairs. Castor's line runs down to Propus and Tejat at his feet, and Pollux stands on Alhena. From the northern hemisphere the figure is up in the evening from about December to April.

The glyph is the Roman numeral two with its bars curved: two upright strokes joined above and below. It is read as the twins standing together, or as two pillars, and the curve in the bars matters more than it looks. Straight, flush bars make it the numeral II again, and with the lower bar left off it becomes the Greek letter pi.

Mercury rules the sign and air is its element, which is where the small planet symbol, the upward air triangle and the lilac-and-blue washes on this page come from. Birds are the natural company for an air sign, and a pair of them, two swallows or two cranes circling a moon, is the usual way to say two without drawing people. The sisters with one shared braid say it with faces.

Where the design comes from

Babylonian astronomers already saw two figures here and called them the Great Twins. The Greek pair are Castor the horseman and Pollux the boxer, sons of Leda: Pollux was fathered by Zeus and born immortal, Castor by the Spartan king Tyndareus and not. When Castor was killed in a fight with their cousins Idas and Lynceus, Pollux asked Zeus to let him share his immortality rather than keep it alone, and the brothers were given alternate days, one among the gods and one beneath the earth. Pindar tells it in the tenth Nemean ode. Sailors prayed to them, and the glow on a ship's mast later called St Elmo's fire was taken as their sign; Rome built them a temple in the Forum after the battle of Lake Regillus. The Geminid meteors that radiate from near Castor every December come from an asteroid, Phaethon, and Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto among these stars in 1930.

Choosing yours

• Settle the bars before anything else. They should curve slightly and reach a little past the pillars at both ends, and that overhang is the difference between the sign and a number. It is also the detail most easily lost when a design is cleaned up for a small size, so look for it on the stencil.
• In a chart the two heads are not the same size and should not be made so. Pollux is brighter, so on a chart that sizes each dot by brightness it is the larger star, and evening them out for symmetry departs from the sky. If you want the difference in colour, Pollux is orange and Castor white, the one honest reason to give a Gemini chart two temperatures; the peach-and-blue wash here plays on the same idea.
• The figure is tall and narrow, two standing bodies with their heads together. That shape suits the inner forearm, the spine or the side of the ribs better than a square field. Decide whether you mean brothers, sisters or yourself, because the chart and the glyph are neutral and a drawn pair of people is not.

Common questions