Warrior Tattoo Ideas, Helmets and Meaning

What a warrior tattoo means

Few people wear a warrior to celebrate fighting. They usually mean discipline, loyalty to the people beside them, or a hard stretch they came through standing up, and some wear one for someone who served. The armour tells a viewer which army the figure belongs to, so choosing the period is choosing the reading.

Many designs here have nobody inside the armour, and they carry the most specific meanings. A crested helmet hung on the hilt of a sword driven into the earth repeats the battlefield cross still set up for the fallen, a rifle standing bayonet down with a helmet on its stock. The empty Corinthian helmet with red poppies growing through its eye openings borrows the remembrance poppy of the First World War, from John McCrae's poem In Flanders Fields of 1915. Both are memorials first. The skull in a crested helmet makes the older memento mori point: the armour outlasted the man.

The helmet sold as Spartan is the Corinthian, beaten from one sheet of bronze and closed over the face but for narrow eye slits and a gap at the mouth; hoplites across the Greek world wore it. Greek art also shows it pushed up off the face, as in the Roman copies of Kresilas's portrait of Pericles, a general in office rather than a fight in progress. The fine-line figure on the ridge, helmet under his arm, makes the same quieter point.

Three figures widen who counts as a warrior. The Amazon drawn like a Greek vase painting wears the patterned trousers and pointed cap Greek painters gave the steppe peoples, among whom Scythian women were buried with their weapons. The braided swordswoman with a black wolf on her red shield is the shieldmaiden of the sagas. The berserker in a bear's pelt and the lion-headed spearman take the animal into the man.

Where the design comes from

Much of the equipment here can be checked against a real object. The spectacle guard on the Viking's iron cap follows the best-known Viking Age helmet, dug from a grave mound at Gjermundbu in Norway in 1943. The legionary's segmented plates and the curved shield painted with wings and thunderbolts come from the reliefs of Trajan's Column in Rome, dedicated in 113. The centurion's crest runs from ear to ear because, as Vegetius wrote, it let his own men find him. The Celt's spiked hair, gold torc and drooping moustache are those of the Dying Gaul, a Roman marble copy of a lost bronze from Pergamon; the knotwork on his cloak comes from Insular manuscripts such as the Book of Kells, centuries younger. The berserker comes from Snorri Sturluson, who wrote in the thirteenth century of Odin's men fighting without mail, biting their shields, strong as bears.

Choosing yours

• Keep to one period. The crest, the shield and the weapon date a figure, and mixing centuries is the commonest mistake in warrior work: horns on a Norse cap, a knight's sword in a hoplite's hand. For a Celt whose ornament matches his torc, ask for the curling spirals of the Battersea Shield, pulled from the Thames in 1857, rather than manuscript knotwork.
• Use the helmet alone when the space is small. A Corinthian helmet is a complete silhouette at 6 cm, as the three-line profile here shows; a whole figure needs room for face, hands and weapon to stay apart.

Common questions