Lantern Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a lantern tattoo means

A lantern is a flame given walls. Glass, horn, paper or pierced metal keeps the wind off so the light can travel, and that is its meaning on skin: not light in general, which a sun or a star would say, but light somebody carries on purpose into a place that is dark. Worn for a hard year, it says the wearer got through by holding on to something; worn for another person, it names who did the carrying.

Across East Asia the lantern also belongs to the dead. During Obon in Japan families hang chōchin to guide ancestral spirits home, and on the last night many towns float paper lanterns down a river or out to sea to send them off again, the custom called tōrō nagashi. Hiroshima floats them on the Motoyasu River every 6 August for those killed in 1945. The European figures here make the same move from the other side: the dotwork reaper, the sheet ghost and the angel of death in teal and burgundy each hold a lantern out in front, which makes them escorts rather than threats.

The red lanterns point somewhere happier. In China round red lanterns hang for the New Year and fill the streets at the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, the year's first full moon, and red there means luck and celebration. The round silk lantern here with its gold cap and long tassel is that lantern, drawn in American traditional. The tall ribbed chōchin in plain red paper between black caps is its Japanese cousin, the kind hung outside izakaya and, at giant size, under the Kaminarimon gate of Sensō-ji in Tokyo.

The moth pressed against the glass of the iron lantern is the oldest joke about light: the creature drawn to it cannot reach it, and would burn if it could.

Where the design comes from

Before clear glass was cheap, English lanterns were glazed with thin scraped horn, which let the light out and kept the rain off, and the old spelling lanthorn grew from that horn, though the word descends from the Latin lanterna. Diogenes of Sinope, in the story Diogenes Laertius tells, lit a lamp in broad daylight and went about saying he was looking for a human being; painters later handed him a lantern, and the Hermit of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith and published in 1909, holds one aloft with a six-pointed star inside. Florence Nightingale's night rounds at Scutari made her the Lady with the Lamp of Longfellow's poem Santa Filomena, though what she actually carried was a folding Turkish lantern, a fanoos.

Choosing yours

• Decide who holds it. Alone, a lantern is about the light; held out by the reaper, the ghost, the mermaid or the fairy with her twig, it is about whoever brings it, and those pieces need 15 cm or more for hand, handle and glow to stay apart.
• Make the glow with contrast. Nothing in black and grey is lighter than bare skin, so the flame and panes inside the frame stay unshaded and the metal around them is shaded darker than would look natural by daylight; the blackwork lantern takes that to its limit. In colour the amber round a candle fades first and needs a black edge.
• Each shape comes from somewhere: the ribbed chōchin from Japan, the round tasselled lantern from China, the pierced one from the souks of Marrakesh and Fez, the hurricane lantern from the farms and railways of the kerosene age, the paper sky lantern from festivals such as Yi Peng in Chiang Mai.

Common questions