Sagittarius Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a sagittarius tattoo means

Sagittarius is the traveller's sign, and the reading most people mean by it is aim rather than attack: an arrow already loosed at something a long way off. It is a fire sign ruled by Jupiter, the planet astrology ties to expansion, luck and long journeys, which is why the arrow is almost always drawn flying up and away rather than at a target.

In the sky the shape people actually find is not an archer but a teapot. Eight of the constellation's brighter stars make a squat pot with a lid, a handle and a spout: Kaus Australis, the brightest in the whole figure, with Kaus Media, Kaus Borealis, Alnasl, Nunki, Ascella and two more. On a dark summer night the Milky Way rises out of the spout like steam. The Arabic names keep the older picture underneath, since kaus means the bow and Alnasl, the star at the tip of the spout, is the point of the arrow.

That spout points almost straight at the middle of our galaxy. Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, lies a few degrees west of Alnasl and about 26,000 light years away, and the Event Horizon Telescope published the first image of it in May 2022. A chart of these stars is, quite literally, a chart of the direction of the galactic centre, and the one watercolour star chart here washes violet behind the stars for that reason.

The glyph is the arrow alone: a straight shaft pointing to the upper right, an open triangular head, and one short bar crossing the shaft at right angles. The bar is what makes it the sign. Without it the mark is an ordinary arrow, a perfectly good tattoo but a different one, and nobody reading it will think of the archer. Oddly, the constellation's alpha star, Rukbat, is only fourth magnitude, one of several places where the Greek letters in this figure ignore brightness.

Where the design comes from

The archer is Babylonian. Their astronomers called him Pabilsag, and boundary stones carve him as a bowman with a horse's body, wings and a scorpion's tail, sometimes with a second, animal head facing backward. The Greeks kept the bow and argued about the body. Eratosthenes, and Hyginus after him, said the archer was Crotus, a son of Pan who invented archery and was set among the stars at the request of the Muses he grew up with, and that he walked on two legs, because centaurs did not use bows. The four-legged centaur won anyway. He is often taken for Chiron, but the wise centaur is usually Centaurus, the large constellation further south, and not the archer at all.

Choosing yours

• Decide which way the arrow flies before the stencil goes on. Running up the arm toward the shoulder it reads as rising; running down toward the hand, as leaving; across the body, as aimed. The upper-right slant is a convention of the printed glyph rather than a rule, and turning it keeps it the sign as long as the crossbar stays on the shaft.
• A centaur is two anatomies joined at the waist, and the join is where drawings fail. Ask to see how the human torso sits on the horse's chest before anything else is drawn, and allow 15 cm or more; below that the four legs, the bow and the string are fighting over the same few millimetres. The single-line and black-figure versions are the ways to go smaller, because they commit to a silhouette and leave most of the anatomy out, the second exactly as Athenian vase painters did by scratching detail through the black.
• For the stars, choose between the Teapot and the full figure. The eight Teapot stars are compact, wider than tall and recognisable to anyone who has looked for them; the full figure spreads further on both sides and loses the shape for everyone else. Keep the dots sized by brightness so that Kaus Australis anchors the drawing.

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