Taurus Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a taurus tattoo means

Taurus is the sign of staying put. Astrology gives it patience, loyalty, steadiness and a frank appetite for comfort, meaning good food, good cloth and a garden, and the less flattering word for the same quality is stubbornness. Most wearers mean both halves and are happy to. The bull suits it because it rarely charges, and once it does, nothing turns it.

The constellation is one of the easiest to find. On a winter evening, follow the three stars of Orion's belt up and to the right and they point at Aldebaran, an orange giant and the brightest star in Taurus, which marks the bull's eye. Around it lies the V of the Hyades, the nearest open cluster to the Sun, forming the face; Aldebaran looks like part of it but is less than half as far away. The two horns run out to single stars at their tips, Elnath and Zeta Tauri. Only the front of the animal is in the sky, head, horns and forelegs, and the charts here keep that cut. From northern latitudes it is an evening sight from about November to March, and it is lost in the Sun's glare in May and June.

The Pleiades ride on the bull's shoulder. The Greeks called them seven sisters, daughters of Atlas and Pleione; most people with good eyes count six, which is where the story of a lost sister comes from. In Japanese the cluster is Subaru, and the car maker's badge is a drawing of it. It is the part of Taurus most people recognise without being told, and a glyph with the cluster set beside its horns is one of the pieces on this page.

The glyph is a head reduced to two shapes. Venus rules the sign, which is where the rosettes, mirrors and flowers in Taurus imagery come from, and the hand mirror framing the stars here is her emblem. Earth is its element, which accounts for the wheat, the poppies and the green-and-ochre washes. The sign runs from about 20 April to 20 May, so spring flowers belong to it as much as horns do.

Where the design comes from

The bull is among the oldest figures in the sky. Babylonian star lists call it the Bull of Heaven, the name of the beast that Ishtar sends against Gilgamesh in the epic and that he and Enkidu kill. The Greeks made it Zeus: a white bull that walked out of the herds on the shore of Phoenicia, let Europa climb on its back and swam with her to Crete, where she became the mother of Minos. Ovid tells it in the second book of the Metamorphoses, and the half-drawn figure is usually explained by the same story, since the bull is still swimming and its hindquarters are under the sea. Crete had its own bull long before: the Bronze Age fresco at Knossos of an acrobat vaulting a charging bull, whose flat terracotta bull one of the coloured designs here borrows. The Crab Nebula, near the southern horn tip, is what is left of a star that Chinese astronomers watched explode in 1054.

Choosing yours

• Keep the crescent sitting on the circle, touching it, and at least as wide. Float it above the circle or shrink it and the mark drifts towards a moon over a ring. Put a cross directly under the circle and you have drawn Mercury, whose symbol is exactly that; the Venus version on this page hangs a whole Venus sign, its own small circle and cross, below the glyph, and that second circle is what keeps it from reading as the planet.
• Choose a chart for its eye. In the constellation pieces the stars sit where they are in the sky and each dot is sized by its brightness, so Aldebaran is always the largest, and in the bull pieces it is the eye, as it is in every old star atlas. The horn lines are what make the figure Taurus. Cropping it to the V of the Hyades to save space leaves a small arrowhead that nobody reads as a bull.
• The Pleiades are the hard part at small size. Six or seven dots in a space the size of a fingernail are the first thing on the piece to merge as ink spreads, and a smudge is not a cluster. Leave a clear gap between the dots of at least their own width, or leave the cluster out and let Aldebaran carry the sky alone.

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