Goat Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a goat tattoo means

The animal has a genuinely good reputation that the occult version has almost buried. Goats climb what nothing else climbs, eat what nothing else eats, and are stubborn in a way that reads as independence rather than as stupidity. Worn straight, a goat is about self-sufficiency and a refusal to be herded.

The scapegoat is a separate and much older idea, and it is literal. Leviticus describes two goats: one sacrificed, one sent alive into the wilderness carrying the sins of the community. That is where the English word comes from, and a goat worn for that reason is about carrying something that was not yours.

The ram is a different animal and a different meaning again. Curled horns rather than swept ones, the head of the flock, and the sign of Aries — spring, the start of the cycle, the first push. People frequently ask for a goat and mean a ram, and the horns are the tell.

Then there is Baphomet, which is not ancient and is worth knowing the age of. The horned, winged, seated figure everyone draws was invented in the nineteenth century, and the inverted star came later still. Worn now it usually means refusal rather than belief — a deliberately unwelcome image chosen because it is unwelcome.

Where the design comes from

The goat became the devil in Christian iconography gradually, absorbing Pan and the satyrs along the way, and the single most influential picture of it is Goya's Witches' Sabbath of around 1798, where the devil is simply a very large goat sitting among a circle of women. Baphomet as drawn today is far more traceable: Eliphas Levi published the seated, winged, torch-headed figure in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie in 1856, largely inventing it. Anton LaVey's Church of Satan then adopted the goat head inside an inverted pentagram as its emblem in 1966, which is the version almost every modern tattoo of it descends from.

Choosing yours

• The pupil is the detail that decides everything. A goat's pupil is a horizontal rectangle, and drawing it correctly keeps the animal an animal — round or slit pupils push the same head straight into demon territory whether or not that was the intention.
• Choose between swept and curled horns before anything else, because that is the choice between a goat and a ram. Swept back along the neck is a goat; spiralling down beside the jaw is a ram, which brings Aries and the flock with it whether you wanted them or not.
• If you want Baphomet specifically, the star has to be there. A bearded goat head alone reads as livestock however heavily it is shaded, and adding the pentagram afterwards means working around a finished head rather than composing with it.

Common questions