Virgo Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a virgo tattoo means

Virgo is the sign of care taken over things. Astrology gives it precision, usefulness, modesty and a habit of noticing what everyone else missed, with perfectionism as the price. People who wear it tend to mean the craft half, the person who does it properly, and the harvest behind the sign, since she has always been the maiden who brings the grain in.

It is the largest constellation in the zodiac and the second largest in the whole sky, after Hydra. The figure is wide and flat, arms of stars spreading from the centre: a small box of four stars at the western end towards Leo, Vindemiatrix above the middle, and Spica low and bright beneath. Spica is Latin for an ear of grain, which is what the maiden holds in every old atlas. From the northern hemisphere Virgo is an evening sight from about April to June. Follow the curve of the Plough's handle to Arcturus and carry straight on, and you reach Spica; skywatchers learn it as arc to Arcturus, then speed on to Spica.

Its other named stars belong to the farm year too. Vindemiatrix means the grape-gatherer, because its rising before dawn in late summer marked the start of the grape harvest. Porrima is a pair of stars named after a Roman goddess of prophecy. Beyond them, where nothing shows to the eye, lies the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, including M87, whose central black hole became the first ever photographed, in 2019.

The glyph is an m whose last stroke drops below the others, bends out and loops back to cross itself once before ending in a short tail. It is usually said to be an M for maiden with the loop standing for the ear of wheat, though its real origin is argued over. Mercury rules the sign, as it rules Gemini, and earth is its element, which accounts for the wheat rings, olive wreaths, sage-and-gold washes and the barred downward triangle, the alchemical sign for earth, that keep the glyph company here.

Where the design comes from

Virgo has been a woman with grain for as long as anyone has recorded her. Babylonian astronomers called Spica the Furrow and pictured a goddess holding an ear of barley. The Greeks made her Astraea, the star maiden of justice and the last of the immortals to leave the earth as people turned violent; Aratus tells it, Ovid places her departure in the Iron Age, and the scales of Libra beside her are read as hers. Others saw Demeter, goddess of the harvest, or her daughter Persephone. Spica itself changed astronomy. Around 130 BC Hipparchus compared its position with records made about a century and a half earlier, found that it had shifted, and so discovered the precession of the equinoxes.

Choosing yours

• Check the loop on the stencil. The glyph's last stroke should cross itself exactly once and end in its short tail; a closed figure eight under the stroke, or a loop that never crosses, is a looser variant, and an arrowhead at the end makes the whole mark Scorpio. The three arches should stay evenly spaced too, or the glyph starts to look like handwriting.
• The chart is wide and flat, so it wants a horizontal field: across the collarbone, the upper back between the shoulder blades, or along the outer forearm with the arm held level. Spica should be the largest dot and low in the figure. In the chart pieces here it is, and in the atlas maiden it sits in the wheat she holds.
• The pieces that set the stars inside something, a locket, a black crescent, an arch of lilies and wheat, make the figure read as a keepsake rather than a map, and a frame also solves the width problem by rounding it off. A plain chart is quieter, but a spread of dots is not recognisable to most people as Virgo; add the glyph or the wheat if you want it read.

Common questions