Grim Reaper Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a grim reaper tattoo means

The reaper is death with work to do. A skull reminds you that you will die; the reaper is the one who comes to collect, and people wear it for three reasons that sit almost opposite each other: to say they are not afraid of it, to say they met it and walked away, or to remember someone it took.

The scythe is the argument of the whole figure. Death cuts people the way a farmer cuts grain, all of them, in season, without choosing, an image as old as the line in Isaiah that all flesh is grass and the grass withers. That is why the figure reads as an equaliser rather than a punishment: it does not judge anybody, it only harvests.

The hourglass is its other tool, and together the two say that time and harvest are one idea: the glass measures what is left and the blade ends it. In Albrecht Dürer's engraving Knight, Death and the Devil of 1513, Death rides beside the knight holding up an hourglass, showing him how much sand remains, the most pointed thing a reaper can do. None of the figures on this page carries a glass, so ask for one if the time is the point.

The hood matters as much as the tools. An empty hood with no face in it is the unknown, the version for people who find a grinning skull too theatrical, while a visible skull makes the figure specific and sardonic. A lantern changes the role again. The weeping, smoke-trailed figure here that carries one is a guide for the dead, the job Greek myth gave to Hermes, rather than a hunter. The throne under one owl-flanked figure makes the visitor a ruler, and skeletal hands clasped in front read as patience rather than a summons.

Where the design comes from

Greek art pictured death as Thanatos, the winged twin brother of Sleep, and Revelation gave it a rider on a pale horse. The skeleton with a scythe is late medieval: after the Black Death of 1347 to 1351 the corpse and the skeleton became the usual figure of Death, sharing scythe and hourglass with Father Time, whose blade goes back to the sickle of Cronus, the Roman Saturn. The black hooded robe settled later; its best-known version is in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal of 1957, where a knight plays chess with Death.

Choosing yours

• Decide between the reaper and the saint; this page holds both. The faceless hood, the figure breaking through a wall and the ghost with the lantern are the European reaper; the crowned skeletons in embroidered gowns, and the figures with an owl, marigolds or a globe, were drawn toward Santa Muerte.
• An empty hood depends on how densely its black is packed. Solid black that heals evenly reads as a void; black laid in thin heals patchy grey, and the missing face becomes a smudge.
• Give the scythe room or leave it out; squeezed short, it becomes an unreadable hook.

Common questions