Pirate Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a pirate tattoo means

A pirate tattoo is worn for the legend, not the men. Real pirates of the early eighteenth century robbed ships and sometimes tortured and killed the crews they caught, and their black flags offered mercy for surrender and none for resistance; a plain red flag meant that no quarter would be given. What people mean by the image is the version storytellers built afterwards: freedom from rules, a life at sea answerable to nobody, and luck taken rather than waited for.

The skull and crossbones did not start with pirates. It was cut into gravestones and mourning rings as a reminder of death long before any crew sewed it onto black cloth, and it keeps that reading, so a Jolly Roger on skin defies death as much as the law. Submariners made it a badge of success: in September 1914 Max Horton brought HMS E9 into Harwich flying one after sinking the German cruiser Hela, and British submarines still hoist a Jolly Roger coming home from an operation.

The props carry separate meanings, so a design can say more than piracy. Crossed cutlasses are a fight chosen and met; the spyglass laid across its star is looking ahead for a course; the treasure chest and the macaw perched on a cutlass hilt over gold coins are fortune; the ship heeling up a wave under a fork of lightning is a storm come through. The skeleton captain raising a goblet from his heap of treasure says what the old flag skeletons said, only with a drink in his hand.

Women pirates are part of the record rather than a modern twist. Anne Bonny and Mary Read, drawn back to back here with pistol and cutlass, sailed with Calico Jack Rackham and were convicted of piracy in Jamaica in 1720, and the woman captain in her red coat stands in the same line.

Where the design comes from

The pirate flag as a design belongs to the early eighteenth century, when captains such as Bartholomew Roberts, around 1720, flew black flags bearing skeletons and hourglasses to announce who was coming. Most of the named flags on posters now were assigned much later. The horned skeleton spearing a bleeding heart was printed as a generic pirate flag in 1912 and only called Blackbeard's decades afterwards, and the skull over crossed cutlasses credited to Calico Jack has no source from his lifetime either. The costume is younger still: Robert Louis Stevenson supplied the one-legged cook, the shoulder parrot and the treasure map in Treasure Island in 1883, and the American illustrator Howard Pyle dressed pirates in the sashes, bandanas and earrings the portraits here still wear.

Choosing yours

• Start from the flag if the space is small. A skull and crossbones is a bold, symmetrical shape that holds at 3 or 4 cm, and the crossed cutlasses drawn in a few strokes hold nearly as small; a skeleton, a kraken or a ship in full rig has fine parts that merge below about fifteen centimetres.
• Know which flag you are wearing. The horned skeleton is popularly credited to Blackbeard and the skull over crossed cutlasses to Calico Jack, but neither attribution rests on evidence from the time, which matters only if the tattoo is meant to name a real man.
• Decide between the man and his kit. A portrait needs 12 cm or more for the face to hold; the tricorn, the flintlock or the cannon on its own says pirate at half that size.

Common questions