Unicorn Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a unicorn tattoo means

A unicorn is a horse with one change, and everything it means lives in that change. Without the horn the animal stands for strength, work and freedom, the ordinary meanings of a horse. With it, it becomes the thing that cannot be caught, owned or found twice, and people who choose a unicorn over a horse are nearly always choosing rarity over power: a person, or a part of themselves, they think of as one of a kind.

The medieval reading is purity, and it grew from a single story. The Physiologus, a Greek book of animal lore from the early Christian centuries, says the unicorn is too fierce for any hunter and will lay its head only in the lap of a virgin. Christian writers read that as the Incarnation, and late medieval painters went as far as staging the Annunciation as a unicorn hunt, with the angel Gabriel blowing the huntsman's horn. For a thousand years the animal was an image of Christ, and the purity reading still clings to the most cartoonish versions.

Scotland gives it a harder edge. The unicorn has supported the Scottish royal arms since the Middle Ages, and since James VI took the English throne in 1603 it has faced the English lion across the royal coat of arms, still wearing its gold chain. Worn by Scots it is heritage first, and the pleasure of a national animal that does not exist.

The modern reading is joy, and a softness chosen on purpose. The rainbow and pastel unicorn came out of the toys and films of the 1980s, the 1982 film of Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn among them, and has since been taken up as a queer emblem, a birthday motif and, in the business slang the investor Aileen Lee coined in 2013, a start-up worth a billion dollars. A rainbow mane now reads as playful before it reads as anything else, which is exactly why some people want one.

Then there is the inversion. The black unicorn with a burning mane and the bare skull with its horn still attached take the purest animal in the bestiary and spoil it deliberately, a comment on innocence lost or refused. They suit people who like the creature and not the pastel.

Where the design comes from

The unicorn entered Western writing as zoology, not legend. Ctesias, a Greek physician at the Persian court around 400 BC, described wild asses in India with a single horn, and wrote that drinking from a cup made of it protected against poison; Pliny the Elder repeated a version in his Natural History. Trade supplied the evidence. Narwhal tusks carried south from the Arctic were sold across Europe as unicorn horn at enormous prices, until the Danish physician Ole Worm showed in 1638 where they came from, and the Danish coronation throne at Rosenborg Castle is faced with them. The best-known images, the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters in New York and The Lady and the Unicorn in Paris, were woven around 1500. The design on this page of a unicorn fenced in beneath a pomegranate tree is drawn after The Unicorn in Captivity, the most reproduced of the New York panels.

Choosing yours

• The horn carries the whole identification. Without it the animal is a horse, and a horn drawn too short, too thin or at a stray angle turns it into a horse with something stuck to its forehead. Ask for it long and rising cleanly from between the ears, with its spiralled grooves given spacing wide enough to survive twenty years of ink spread; a tightly wound spiral is the first detail on this page to close into a plain grey cone.
• Choose the tradition before the style, because each one draws a different animal. The heraldic unicorn rears on its hind legs with a goat's beard, cloven hooves and a lion's tail, and heavy traditional line suits it. The unicorn of the New York Tapestries is white, bearded and slight, and wants botanical detail around it. The modern one is a horse with a rainbow and belongs to new-school or anime colour. A cartoon face on a heraldic body usually looks like an error rather than a joke.
• A rainbow mane is six colours in bands, and each band needs room to hold its own hue. At small sizes neighbouring colours crowd one another and the mane reads as a smear, so either give it space or keep the mane to two or three colours, as the anime and neo-traditional unicorns here do.

Common questions