Gun Tattoo Ideas, Revolvers and Meaning

What a gun tattoo means

Tattooing prefers old guns. Most of this page is flintlocks, single-action revolvers and a derringer, the firearms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that distance is much of why they work as emblems. A six-shooter stands for the frontier, the outlaw and the lawman in one shape; a flintlock for the sea and the duel. The age lets the image mean self-reliance or defiance without pointing at anyone in particular.

Pairings do most of the talking. Crossed revolvers with a red rose at the crossing are love that carries danger, or something worth defending, in the grammar of American traditional flash, and Guns N' Roses, formed in Los Angeles in 1985, put two pistols and roses on its logo. A rose stem threaded through a trigger guard, as in the chicano revolver here, turns the gun into something closer to a keepsake. The clown in a fedora holding a revolver comes from the chicano black and grey of East Los Angeles, where the gun belongs to a gangster portrait rather than standing on its own.

A flower growing out of the barrel reverses the object. On 21 October 1967 Bernie Boston photographed a protester at the March on the Pentagon placing carnations in soldiers' rifle barrels, and the picture made the flowered gun a sign for peace. The same idea stands in bronze outside the United Nations in New York: a revolver with its barrel tied in a knot by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, made after John Lennon was shot and installed in 1988. Worn that way, a gun is a sign against guns.

The last reading is personal. A gun that belonged to a grandfather, or a service revolver, is a portrait of its owner more than of the weapon, and its grip, engraving and barrel length should be copied from the real thing.

Where the design comes from

The guns on this page are older than the electric tattoo machine, which Samuel O'Reilly patented in New York in 1891. The flintlock armed Europe from the seventeenth century until percussion caps replaced it in the nineteenth. Duelling pistols were sold as cased, matched pairs so that both men fired identical weapons, and Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton in 1804 with one of a borrowed pair. Samuel Colt patented his revolver in 1836, and the long-barrelled single-action shape of the realism revolver and the holstered ones here is the Colt Single Action Army that the US Army adopted in 1873. Henry Deringer of Philadelphia gave his name, spelt with an extra r by imitators, to the pocket pistol; the two-barrelled kind here follows Remington's, made from 1866 until 1935.

Choosing yours

• Mind the muzzle. On a forearm the barrel can point along the limb; on the neck, the hand or the chest a barrel aimed at the wearer's own head, or straight at whoever is facing them, changes the reading to threat or self-harm whatever was meant. Angling it upward, as the flowered revolver does, or crossing two, settles it.
• Pick the gun by its era, since the lock and the grip date it: a flintlock shows cock and pan on the side, a single-action revolver a hammer spur and a plain curved grip, and the short-barrelled revolver of the blackwork silhouette and the line drawing here is twentieth century.
• Engraving is where guns age worst. Floral scroll on a frame, like the derringer's, needs 10 cm or more to stay legible; below that, keep the steel clean and put the detail into a rose.

Common questions