Tattoos that carry something
Fourteen themes with the symbols people choose, why they choose them, and how to make a design personal.
Faith
A faith tattoo is one of the few you will carry into rooms where it is read by people who know the symbol better than you do, so accuracy matters.
Family
The best family tattoos are designed with space left in them, because families keep changing and a piece that cannot grow is a piece you will outgrow.
Freedom
Freedom is the easiest theme to draw badly, because the stock images are everywhere, and the easiest to draw well once you name what you got free of.
Healing
Healing tattoos are usually about the repair being visible rather than hidden, which is why the best ones keep the crack in the picture.
Love
Love tattoos age best when they record something that happened rather than making a promise, so the date, the place and the handwriting outlast the symbol.
Memorial
A memorial tattoo works when it points to one specific person rather than to grief in general, so the small true details matter more than the symbol.
Mental health
A tattoo can mark how far you have come, which is worth doing, as long as it is understood as a marker of progress rather than a substitute for treatment.
Motherhood
Motherhood tattoos are usually made of small concrete facts, a flower, a name in a child's hand, a time on a clock, rather than any single symbol.
Music
Music tattoos go wrong more often than any other theme for one boring reason: the notation gets copied incorrectly and nobody checks it first.
New beginnings
A new beginnings tattoo is easier to get right a year in than a week in, because by then you know which part of the change actually mattered.
Protection
Protection symbols come from somewhere specific, and knowing the source usually changes which one you want and how you want it drawn.
Strength
Strength tattoos land better when they refer to something you actually got through, because the symbol alone is a claim and the detail is the evidence.
Travel
The difference between a travel tattoo that means something and one that means nothing is usually whether the map data is real.
Zodiac
There are three quite different zodiac tattoos: the glyph, the animal and the actual sky, and they suit different people and very different sizes.