Leo Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a leo tattoo means

Leo is the Sun's own sign, and astrology hands it the Sun's qualities: warmth, pride, generosity, a wish to be seen and a loyalty that is fierce once given. The flattering word is magnetism and the unflattering one is vanity. People who wear it mostly mean the warmth, the lion who looks after the pride, and many are simply marking a birthday between late July and late August.

Unusually, the stars do look like the animal. A backwards question mark called the Sickle makes the head and mane, with Regulus as the dot at its foot; a triangle of stars farther east makes the haunches, and Denebola, whose name is Arabic for the lion's tail, sits at the tip. Regulus lies almost exactly on the Sun's path, so the Moon periodically passes in front of it. From the northern hemisphere Leo is the great spring constellation, high on evenings from March to May: follow the two pointer stars of the Plough away from the Pole Star and they lead there.

Regulus means the little king, a Latin rendering of an older Greek name, and the royal idea is older than either, since Babylonian astronomers called the star simply the King. Older charts also call it Cor Leonis, the lion's heart. Algieba, in the mane, is a pair of golden stars that a small telescope splits. The lion's tail once ended in a tuft of faint stars as well, until sixteenth-century mapmakers split it off as a constellation of its own, Coma Berenices, the hair of Berenice.

The glyph is one stroke: a small circle that rises in a high arc and hooks down into a tail. It is usually said to be the lion's tail, or its mane drawn in a single line. Fire is the element and the Sun the ruler, which is why pieces here set the stars on a sun's face, turn the glyph into a flame and put a red sun disc behind a lion. The Sun passes through the constellation from about 10 August to mid-September, while the sign runs from late July to late August, so many Leos were born with the Sun among the stars of Cancer.

Where the design comes from

The lion in the sky is the Nemean lion, the first of the twelve labours of Heracles: a beast whose hide no weapon could pierce, which Heracles strangled and then skinned with its own claws, wearing the pelt as armour ever after. Mesopotamian astronomers had already seen a great lion in these stars, which suggests the Greeks inherited the animal and supplied the story. The lion and sun is a separate emblem with an astrological root, the Sun in its own house of Leo. It appears on thirteenth-century Seljuk coins, became the emblem on the flag of Iran, and was removed after the revolution of 1979, so for many Iranians it still carries political weight. Every November the Leonid meteors radiate from the Sickle, and in 1833 they fell over North America as a storm of tens of thousands an hour.

Choosing yours

• Keep the circle small. It should be a fraction of the height of the arc; grow it and the two loops start to balance, and the mark reads as a figure eight rather than the sign. The tail should flick outward at the bottom instead of curling back under, the other detail that goes soft when the glyph is drawn small.
• Decide whether the stars or the lion lead. Because the figure really is a lion, the constellation can carry a piece on its own, with the Sickle as the mane, which is not true of most signs. Laid over a drawn lion, as several designs here are, the Sickle belongs on the head and Regulus at the chest, the way star atlases always placed it; check both on the stencil, because stars scattered along a lion's back are ornament rather than the constellation.
• If what you really want is a lion portrait, the sign is the smaller part of the drawing and the decisions are the animal's: realism needs size for the mane, and linework or faceted heads hold small. Two lions here come from outside the Greek story. The Chinese guardian lion with a paw on a ball is the male of a pair, since the female rests hers on a cub, and the Japanese lion leaping under the stars is a guardian as well, so it brings protection into the piece.

Common questions