Lips Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a lips tattoo means

Lips sit between the heart and the rose and mean something neither can. A heart is love as an idea and a rose is love with its cost attached; lips are the place where love, speech and silence physically happen. Choosing lips over a heart is usually choosing the physical over the sentimental: desire, confidence, a kiss that happened rather than a feeling in general.

The kiss is what most people mean. A red mouth says desire and self-possession, and a woman wearing one is often wearing her own mouth, as a note about being at ease in her body rather than a message to anybody. The most personal version is a real print: a partner, a parent or a grandmother presses a lipstick kiss onto paper and the artist traces it line for line, so the tattoo records one mouth the way a signature records one hand.

The second group is about speech. A forked snake's tongue sliding out between the lips is the idiom for a liar made literal, a dagger clenched in the teeth is a fight about to start, and a mouth caught mid-word belongs to a singer or to someone who finally said the thing. People who work with their voices, singers, actors, teachers, lawyers, sometimes choose lips for this reason rather than for the kiss.

The third is silence, and it carries the most weight. A finger pressed to the lips asks for a secret to be kept. A mouth sewn shut is silence imposed, worn both by people who were not allowed to speak and by people who decided not to, and strangers cannot tell which is meant. That makes the stitched mouth one of the few lips designs that stays private by default.

The rest are play. Bubble gum, a kiss shape in cartoon gloss, a butterfly landed on the upper lip: these are about fun and flirtation, and they are allowed to be nothing deeper. Nobody needs a reason for a red mouth on the hip, and the designs that admit it tend to be the ones that still make their owners smile in twenty years.

Where the design comes from

Lips as a picture on their own owe more to art and advertising than to tattoo flash. Man Ray spent the early 1930s painting a pair of red lips, modelled on Lee Miller's, floating over a landscape; Salvador Dalí turned Mae West's mouth into a sofa later in the same decade; The Rocky Horror Picture Show opened in 1975 on a disembodied mouth singing; and John Pasche's tongue-and-lips logo for the Rolling Stones, first used on Sticky Fingers in 1971, became one of the most reproduced images in music. Tattooing took the mouth from that pop tradition, which is why it is usually drawn glossy red with a white highlight, as a magazine drew it, rather than in any older tattoo manner. The finger to the lips is far older: Greeks and Romans misread the child's gesture on Egyptian statues of the young Horus and made him Harpocrates, a god of silence and secrets.

Choosing yours

• Decide which of the three mouths you mean, because the drawing changes with it. A kiss is closed or barely parted and usually glossy red; speech is open, with teeth or a tongue showing; silence is closed with something across it, a finger or a row of stitches. An open mouth with teeth reads as a snarl or a laugh depending on a millimetre or two at the corners, so settle the expression on the stencil rather than in the chair.
• Teeth and highlights are what age worst. Small pale shapes inside a dark or red field are exactly what ink spread closes, and a row of teeth less than about 6 cm across tends to become a pale bar within a few years. The white shine on a glossy lip is just as fragile, because white ink fades and can turn yellowish, so the better version leaves that highlight as bare skin.
• Red is the classic colour here, and red pigment is the one most often behind allergic reactions in tattoos: a raised, itchy patch that can appear weeks or even years after healing and sometimes flares in sun. It is uncommon, but a pair of lips is mostly red, so if you have reacted to red ink before, tell the artist, who may suggest a test spot or a black-and-grey version.

Common questions