Griffin Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a griffin tattoo means

A griffin is a guardian before it is anything else. Almost every ancient source puts it beside something valuable: a throne, a tomb, a hoard of gold, a temple door. It joins the lion, strongest on the ground, to the eagle, strongest in the air, and the point of the combination is vigilance in both directions at once. People who wear one usually mean the protection of something specific, a family, a home, a promise, rather than strength in general.

That is what separates it from its two halves. An eagle on skin is the emblem of a state and a lion is a claim about character; a griffin is a job. It stands guard, and its pose carries the meaning. Rearing with talons out is a guard issuing a challenge, lying like a sphinx with folded wings is a guard at rest, and a forefoot on a heap of coins is the old story of the gold it keeps.

Against the phoenix it is the opposite kind of mythical creature. A phoenix is about one life ending and coming back. A griffin never changes; it is permanence and watchfulness, the thing still standing after the story has moved on, which is why it suits a vow or a family crest better than a recovery.

Christian writers gave it a second meaning. Because it joined the king of birds to the king of beasts, medieval readers took it for the two natures of Christ, and in Dante's Purgatorio a griffin draws the chariot through the Earthly Paradise. The bestiaries of the same centuries also describe it tearing apart horses and men, so a religious griffin needs its context to be read that way.

Heraldry keeps it busiest. A rearing griffin is blazoned segreant, a word heralds keep almost entirely for this one creature, and English heraldry also recognises a male griffin, wingless and bristling with spikes. Towns and families across Europe carry one, and the dukes of Pomerania were known simply as the House of Griffins.

Where the design comes from

The griffin is far older than Greece. Eagle-headed lions appear in Elam and Egypt by around 3000 BC, and in Bronze Age Crete a pair of painted griffins flanks the stone throne at Knossos. The Achaemenid Persians carved horned griffins on the column capitals and reliefs of Persepolis, which is the source of the stiff, patterned version with curling horns. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, repeated with some doubt a story from the steppe of one-eyed Arimaspians stealing gold from the griffins that guarded it, and that is where the heap of coins comes from. The historian Adrienne Mayor has argued that nomad prospectors in the Gobi may have been looking at skeletons of Protoceratops, a beaked, four-legged dinosaur whose bones lie in the same deserts; it is a hypothesis rather than a settled fact, but it would explain why the story comes from that region.

Choosing yours

• The ears make it a griffin. Pointed, upright ears behind the eye, often tufted, are the ancient griffin's signature, and without them a head-only design stops reading as a griffin and becomes an eagle. The same test works for the whole animal. With no beak and no feathers it is a winged lion, and anything scaled rather than feathered is a dragon, which is why the famous boundary creatures of the City of London, so often called griffins, are dragons.
• Work out the join before the stencil. Feathers have to turn into fur somewhere across the chest and shoulders, the forelegs are an eagle's, scaled and taloned, and the hind legs are a lion's with pads and a tufted tail. A drawing that blurs those lines reads as a costume rather than a creature, and in realism the join is where most of the hours go.
• Pick the posture by its heraldic name, which artists who work on crests will understand exactly: segreant is rearing with wings raised, passant walking with a foreleg lifted, sejant sitting upright, couchant lying down. A segreant griffin is tall and suits the arm or the ribs; a couchant one is long and low and suits the forearm or a line across the upper back.

Common questions