Ouroboros Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a ouroboros tattoo means

Most symbols need a convention to be read. A dove means peace because we agreed it does. The ouroboros does not need the agreement — the picture states its own argument, which is that something can keep going only by using itself up. That is why it survives translation between cultures that never met.

Two readings come out of that, and they pull in opposite directions. The hopeful one is eternal return: nothing truly ends, the cycle closes and starts again, and what looks like destruction is the mechanism of renewal. The bleak one is self-consumption: the thing is eating itself and will eventually run out. Both are honest readings of the same drawing.

In practice most people wear the first. It is chosen for recovery, for a cycle survived, for the recognition that the version of you that arrives is built from the version that was spent getting there. Worn that way it is closer to a phoenix than to a warning, but with the cost written into the image rather than left out of it.

The last thing worth deciding is the middle. A closed ring is also an enclosure, and putting a moon, an eye, a date or a name inside turns the symbol into a frame for something else. That is a real choice rather than a decoration: an empty ring is about the cycle, and a filled one is about whatever you put in it.

Where the design comes from

The oldest surviving example is Egyptian. Two serpents biting their own tails encircle the figure of the king in the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld, painted on a gilded shrine in the tomb of Tutankhamun and so dating to around 1323 BC. Greek-speaking alchemists in Roman Egypt took the figure up centuries later: a drawing in the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, usually placed around the third century AD, encloses the words hen to pan, "the all is one", inside the ring. Its modern fame owes a great deal to a story August Kekule told an audience in 1890, that the ring structure of benzene had come to him in 1865 after he dreamt of a snake seizing its own tail — a good story whether or not it was true, and the reason the symbol turns up in chemistry departments.

Choosing yours

• It is a ring, so it suits fields that are round or can be wrapped: the outer upper arm, the shoulder, the outside of a wrist, the centre of the back. A ring squeezed into a narrow vertical becomes an oval, which loses most of what the shape was for.
• The bite has to survive the final size. Where the jaws meet the tail is the only thing separating this from an ordinary coiled snake, so that junction needs real space — if the design shrinks, shrink the body and protect the mouth.
• Decide the interior before the outline is drawn. An empty middle and a filled one are different tattoos, and adding something later means working inside a finished ring, which is much harder than planning for it.

Common questions