Libra Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a libra tattoo means

Libra is the one sign in the zodiac that is a thing rather than a living creature, and that changes what it says. Every other sign is a character with a temperament; a balance has no temperament at all, only a job. Worn as a sign it claims fairness, proportion and the habit of weighing both sides before deciding, and most people who choose it mean the weighing more than the verdict. It is also ruled by Venus, as Taurus is, and that is where the roses, hearts and flowers that so often end up in the pans come from.

The constellation is faint and easy to miss. It sits in the gap between Spica in Virgo and Antares in Scorpius, and neither of its two brightest stars, Zubenelgenubi and Zubeneschamali, is much brighter than third magnitude. Their names are Arabic for the southern claw and the northern claw, because for centuries these stars were the pincers of the scorpion next door. Joined as a stick figure, the constellation is a small triangle with two strings of stars hanging from its lower corners, which is why it reads so readily as a beam with two pans.

The glyph is two horizontal strokes: a straight line underneath and, above it, a line that rises in the middle into a rounded hump. It is read in two ways. One is the balance itself, a beam lifted at its pivot. The other is the sun half set on the horizon at the September equinox, when day and night are the same length, and the tropical zodiac starts the sign on exactly that day.

Most of the meaning in a scales tattoo sits in the pans rather than in the scales. A heart weighed against a feather is the Egyptian judgement of the dead; a sun against a moon is the equinox again; a skull against an hourglass is a life weighed against the time it has. A level beam says the two are equal. A tipped one says a judgement has been made, and which pan drops is the whole sentence.

Where the design comes from

The balance is older than the Greeks. Babylonian astronomers already called these stars the balance of heaven, but the Greeks folded them into Scorpius and named them Chelae, the Claws. In the first century BC the Romans made them a separate balance again, although Ptolemy, writing the Almagest around AD 150, still kept the Greek name. Justice arrived through Astraea, the star maiden whom Ovid describes as the last of the immortals to leave the earth once people turned to bloodshed; she became Virgo beside it, and her scales went up with her. Civic art later handed the same scales to Justitia, and the bronze figure F. W. Pomeroy made for the dome of the Old Bailey in London still holds them, famously without a blindfold.

Choosing yours

• Settle level or tipped before anything else. A level beam is balance kept; a tipped beam is a verdict, and the heavier pan becomes the subject of the tattoo. Artists default to level, so a deliberate tilt has to be asked for, and it should drop toward whichever element you want to win.
• The chains are the fragile part. Three or four fine chains per pan look delicate on the day and close into a grey smear as the ink spreads, so keep two per pan, spaced well apart, or hang the pans from single rods. Solid black pans, like the pair on the scales built around a sword here, hold their shape far longer than open engraved bowls.
• For the glyph, leave the gap between the two lines at least as wide as the lines themselves, or they merge into one band within a few years. Leave out the lower line and the upper one on its own looks like a Greek omega, which is the quickest way to lose the sign.

Common questions