InkCraftLightning Bolt Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning
9 original lightning designs drawn for InkCraftBy Uladzimir TumanauUpdated
The bolt was Zeus's weapon before it was a high-voltage warning, and both say the same thing: power arriving all at once. Outlined zigzags close up below about three centimetres, and a doubled angular bolt reads as the insignia of Hitler's SS.
Black and white tribal lightning tattoo design Try it on — Black and white tribal lightning tattoo design
Black and grey stick and poke lightning tattoo design: a lightning bolt Try it on — Black and grey stick and poke lightning tattoo design: a lightning bolt
Black and grey cybersigilism lightning tattoo design Try it on — Black and grey cybersigilism lightning tattoo design
Color traditional lightning and eye tattoo design Try it on — Color traditional lightning and eye tattoo design
Black and white blackwork lightning and cloud tattoo design Try it on — Black and white blackwork lightning and cloud tattoo design
Color traditional lightning and cloud tattoo design Try it on — Color traditional lightning and cloud tattoo design
Black and white blackwork lightning and cloud tattoo design Try it on — Black and white blackwork lightning and cloud tattoo design
Black and grey flash lightning and heart tattoo design Try it on — Black and grey flash lightning and heart tattoo design
Color patchwork lightning and guitar tattoo design Try it on — Color patchwork lightning and guitar tattoo design
Tap any design to see it on your own skin in the try-on — no signup.
This set of 9 lightning designs, by the numbers
- Styles represented
- traditional (2), blackwork (2), tribal (1), stick and poke (1), cybersigilism (1), flash (1)
- Black-and-grey vs colour
- 67% black-and-grey, 33% colour
- Most often drawn with
- cloud, eye, heart, star
Counted from the 9 designs shown on this page. Every one was drawn for InkCraft — none are scraped or reposted. Free to reference with a link to this page.
What a lightning tattoo means
Lightning is the oldest picture of a force nobody argues with. In Hesiod's Theogony the Cyclopes give Zeus the thunderbolt. The Norse gave thunder to Thor, and the two gods still share a day of the week: Thursday is named for Thor, and the French jeudi for Jupiter, the Roman Zeus. Hindu myth and Buddhist ritual hold the same force in the vajra, and the Sanskrit word means both thunderbolt and diamond, a power that cannot itself be broken.
On a person the bolt is usually about a moment rather than a god. Being struck is the ordinary phrase for anything that splits a life into before and after, a diagnosis, a meeting, an idea that arrived whole. It carries a wedding date as easily as the year of an accident.
Electricity is the newer reading and just as plain. Once experiments proposed by Benjamin Franklin showed in 1752 that lightning is an electric spark, the bolt became the drawing of a current, and the yellow warning triangle made it the sign for one that can kill; on skin it reads as energy, nerve or temper. David Bowie wore a red and blue bolt across his face on the cover of Aladdin Sane in 1973, and Harry Potter's scar is a bolt, so a very small one is sometimes a book tattoo rather than a weather one.
⚠️ One form has to be avoided. Two angular bolts side by side, straight-edged, parallel and matching, are the insignia of Hitler's SS: the doubled Sig rune, which the Anti-Defamation League lists as a hate symbol and German law bans from public display. A single bolt carries none of that, and nothing on this page is drawn that way. If a design needs two bolts, make them different sizes, forked or curved, and never a matching angular pair.
Where the design comes from
The drawn bolt is a convention, not a picture: real lightning branches and forks and never falls in three tidy segments. Silver coins struck at Elis, the city that ran the Olympic Games, show Zeus's thunderbolt as a winged bundle of zigzag prongs. Warning signs and comic books boiled it down to one stepped stroke, and twentieth-century American flash took that up as stock filler between larger pieces. The forked, barbed bolts here go back toward the real thing.
Choosing yours
- Fill a small bolt rather than outlining it. Outlined zigzags have sharp inner corners that fill in first as the lines spread, so a line bolt under about three centimetres ends up as a dark blot with a tail; a solid one stays a bolt. The dotted outline here needs more room for the same reason.
- Decide which way it strikes. Out of a cloud it reads as weather, a storm come through; alone and pointing down, a hit of energy or luck; rising, charge rather than impact.
- Yellow fades early in sunlight, so a yellow bolt depends on its black outline.
Size, cost and placement
How big, and what it costs
A single bolt of two to five centimetres is shop-minimum work. A cloud with bolt and rain runs 8 to 12 cm and an hour or two; the colour eye with its bolts is 10 to 15 cm and two to three hours.
Where it sits, and how much it hurts
A small bolt sits well behind the ear, on the inner wrist or the ankle, none of them painful. A forked bolt needs 12 cm or more and a vertical run such as the forearm or calf, or its branches merge.
What to ask your artist
- Whether to fill the bolt rather than outline it at your size.
- If there are two bolts, that they cannot read as the doubled SS rune.
- How heavy an outline a yellow bolt needs as it fades.
Prices vary widely by city and artist — treat these as session lengths rather than quotes, and expect a shop minimum on anything small. The cost guide turns hours into money by size, placement and style.
Common questions
Is a double lightning bolt tattoo a Nazi symbol?
Two matching angular bolts side by side are: the SS insignia, listed as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League and banned from display in Germany. A single bolt is not, nor are two of different sizes.
What does a bolt coming out of a storm cloud say?
Usually that a hard stretch was survived: the cloud is the weather and the bolt its worst moment. Rain lines make it heavier.
Is a tiny lightning bolt a sensible first tattoo?
One of the better ones, and done in well under an hour. Keep it solid, and off the side of a finger, where it loses its points within a year or two.
Can a bolt be about Thor rather than Zeus?
A bare bolt belongs to neither god. For Thor add Mjölnir, his hammer; for Zeus add the eagle, which stands on a thunderbolt on the coins of Ptolemaic Egypt.
What a lightning tattoo can mean
The meanings this motif carries on the pages that argue them. Each line is that page's own reason for including it.
- Strength tattoos
- Strength as a single discharge rather than endurance: brief, total and impossible to ignore. It is the only motif in this group that is not a living thing, and a lone bolt stays legible at almost any size.
- Greek mythology tattoos
- The weapon the Cyclopes forged for Zeus, and the sign that a god has taken an interest. Drawn as one jagged bolt it reads as sudden power; gripped in a fist it stands for the king of the gods himself.
See it on your skin before you commit
InkCraft places any of these designs on a photo of you — scaled, wrapped and shaded to the placement you pick.