Mushroom Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a mushroom tattoo means

A mushroom is the smallest visible part of a much larger thing. The cap and stem are a fruiting body, pushed up for a few days to shed spores, while the fungus itself is a mass of threads called mycelium that can live for years inside soil or a fallen trunk. One honey fungus in the Blue Mountains of Oregon spreads under almost ten square kilometres of forest. That is why the motif is chosen for connection, and for whatever in a life carries on out of sight.

Fungi are also how a forest deals with its dead. They break down fallen wood and leaves that little else can digest and hand them back to the soil, so a mushroom rising from a stump is new life fed directly by an old one. Worn that way it is a gentler memorial than a skull, and a common choice after a loss or a long recovery. Mushrooms also appear overnight after rain, which gave English its verb for sudden growth.

Folklore split the red one in two. The fly agaric, the red cap with white warts on the traditional design here, is poison to eat, yet in Germany and Austria it is printed on New Year cards as a lucky charm beside chimney sweeps and four-leaf clovers, and a lucky person there is a Glückspilz, a luck mushroom. British and Irish folklore set fairies dancing inside rings of mushrooms, and one fairy on this page stands in exactly such a ring.

The last reading arrives uninvited. To some strangers any mushroom means psilocybin, and a cluster of slender, glowing caps like the watercolour one here invites that far more than a chanterelle does. Foragers wear the edible species for the opposite reason, as a record of seasons spent in woods learning which ones are safe, and the chanterelle and the three morels here are drawn closely enough to recognise.

Where the design comes from

People carried fungi long before they drew them. Ötzi, found in the Ötztal Alps in 1991, died around 3300 BC with 61 tattoos, carrying birch polypore threaded on a leather thong and tinder fungus for lighting fires. Lewis Carroll sat a hookah-smoking caterpillar on a mushroom in 1865, one side of whose cap makes Alice grow and the other shrink. Beatrix Potter painted hundreds of fungi, and her paper on how their spores germinate was read to the Linnean Society of London in 1897 by George Massee, because women were not admitted. In 1957 Life magazine printed R. Gordon Wasson's account of a Mazatec mushroom ceremony in Oaxaca, and the psychedelic reading went mainstream.

Choosing yours

• Name the species, because each is a different silhouette: the fly agaric a domed spotted cap over a ragged skirt, the shaggy ink cap a tall scaly bell, the chanterelle a wavy funnel with forked ridges for gills, the morel a pitted honeycomb. A generic one, like the small stick-and-poke cap here, works as a filler.
• The drip on the blackwork ink cap is biology. Ink caps digest their own gills into black liquid within hours, and the common ink cap, Coprinopsis atramentaria, is named from the Latin for ink because that liquid was once written with.
• Plan the white. Fly agaric warts are usually bare skin left open in the red, since white ink yellows, and open spots need a cap of 5 cm or more to stay round. Gills seen from beneath merge into a grey disc below about 8 cm.

Common questions