Icarus Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a icarus tattoo means

The myth is usually quoted as a warning about ambition, and that reading is real but incomplete. Daedalus told his son not to fly too high, where the sun would melt the wax, and also not to fly too low, where the sea spray would clog the feathers. The instruction was about the middle course, and the half everyone forgets is the one about flying too low.

That makes it a far more useful image than the moral version allows. Read whole, Icarus is about the cost of both failures, and plenty of people wear it meaning the second: that caution has a price too, and that they would rather have gone up.

The wings are the part that carries the meaning and the part most often drawn wrong. They were built, strapped on and held together with wax — a machine, borrowed, with a known failure mode. An angel's wings grow from the back and cannot fail. Drawing straps and buckles is the difference between a myth about hubris and a picture of a cherub.

The sun is the other half. Icarus without the sun is a falling man; the sun is what makes the fall a consequence rather than an accident. In the strongest versions it is a hard disc rather than a light source, which is closer to how the myth treats it: an indifferent thing he flew into.

Where the design comes from

The story comes to us mainly through Ovid's Metamorphoses, written around 8 AD, which is also where the detail about the middle course appears. The visual tradition is much stranger than the myth suggests: Bruegel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus", painted around 1560, puts the boy in the corner of the canvas as two legs disappearing into the sea while a ploughman works on, unbothered — which is the painting Auden wrote about and the reason the story is now as much about indifference as about ambition. Tattooing arrived at the subject late and through the classical revival rather than through flash, which is why there is no traditional Icarus the way there is a traditional eagle, and why most of what circulates is illustrative black and grey.

Choosing yours

• Insist on the harness. Straps, buckles and a wooden frame are what stop the piece reading as an angel, which is a different subject with only the caption to tell them apart. They are also the first thing an artist will leave out, because they complicate the silhouette.
• Keep the sun in frame. It can be a flat disc, a rayed device or a bright void, but without it the figure is just falling and the cause of the fall is missing.
• Pick a moment other than the fall if you can. The climb, the fastening of the last feather, the instant at the apex when he is neither rising nor falling — all of them are rarer, and all of them carry the story better than a body dropping.

Common questions