Tulip Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a tulip tattoo means

A tulip is mostly worn for love, and its colour does the talking. The Victorian flower dictionaries fixed the readings still repeated today: Kate Greenaway's Language of Flowers of 1884 gives the red tulip as a declaration of love, the variegated one as beautiful eyes and the yellow as hopeless love, a meaning that has since softened into cheerfulness. Other colours carry no reading from that book, which leaves the purple, pink and orange tulips here free to mean what their wearer says.

In Persian poetry the red tulip with its dark centre is the lover's scorched heart and the martyr's blood, a reading still alive in Iran, whose national emblem is said to evoke one. For the Ottomans the flower was sacred as well as fashionable. Written in Ottoman script, lale, the Turkish word for tulip, uses the same letters as Allah, and read backwards it spells hilal, the crescent, so the tulip with a small crescent moon inside it on this page sits close to a pairing much older than tattooing.

The Dutch reading is value and how fast it goes. In the 1630s single bulbs of the flamed varieties changed hands for more than a skilled craftsman earned in a year, and the collapse of February 1637 made tulip mania the standing example of a bubble. Painters of the Dutch Golden Age set tulips beside skulls and insects in vanitas still lifes, and the wilting tulip here, its bloom bowed and a petal falling, belongs to that line.

Then there is spring itself. A tulip is one of the first large flowers of the year, and it keeps growing after it is cut, lengthening in the vase and bending toward the light, which is what the tulip leaning in its glass jar here shows. A bunch of three wrapped in paper is the ordinary gift of a new season, and it reads as a beginning rather than an ending.

Where the design comes from

Wild tulips grow on the slopes of the Tien Shan and the Pamirs, and Ottoman gardeners bred them towards a long, pointed bloom: the almond-shaped tulip of the Iznik tiles in mosques such as Rüstem Pasha's in Istanbul. The years 1718 to 1730, late in the reign of Ahmed III, are remembered as the Tulip Era. Europe named the flower after the Turkish word for turban cloth, and Carolus Clusius planted bulbs at Leiden in the 1590s. The flames prized in the mania were a virus carried by aphids, as Dorothy Cayley showed at the John Innes institution from 1928, and the historian Anne Goldgar argued in Tulipmania (2007) that the crash ruined far fewer people than its legend says.

Choosing yours

• Give the leaves their width. A tulip has a few broad, strap-shaped leaves that wrap the foot of a single unbranched stem, and those long leaves make half the silhouette; drawn thin like a rose's, they turn it into any flower. The cup has six petals, three outer and three inner, so a side view shows three, and a closed bloom should end in points rather than a smooth dome.
• Then match line weight to how it should look in ten years. Flat colour inside a heavy outline, as on the yellow and the flamed Dutch tulips here, keeps its colour longest; fine veins inside the petals are the most fragile detail.

Common questions