Welsh Celtic Tattoos, Part 2

Posted on October 3, 2009
Filed Under Tattoo History, Tattoo Meanings

We continue to talk about Welsh Celtic tattoos which now face a real revival and are extremely popular. They are abstract, paradoxical, dreary and what’s more important - sacral. Last time we spoke about the well-known Celtic Cross.

Celtic knotwork symbolizes close ties between Life and Place of a human being in the Universe, and has different meanings: Trinity knot stands for the Holy Trinity (now) or means the triplicity of Celtic gods and goddesses; Love knot made of the interlaced symbols of infinity shows the natural unity of two people; and a Spiral Celtic tattoo tells us about the inner state of a person who wears it, about his desire to achieve mental equilibrium.

Celtic Dragon Tattoos

Dragon tattoo design goes back to the times of King Arthur Pendragon, the king from the legends of King Arthur, who ordered to draw a Celtic dragon on his armor, for dragon was a symbol of sovereignty, royal power, wisdom and victory.

Present-day dragon tattoos usually depict a winged creature, but traditionally Celtic dragon is a serpent encircled with classic knotwork. Celtic dragons don’t have wings; they walked on the ground and left tracks known as dragon lines which were believed to conduct cosmic powers. The points of their intersection are the places of concentration of power. Druids searched for such places and erected megaliths there, one of them is Stonehenge.

Celtic Sun Tattoos

The sun was the main object of worshiping among the Celts. The eight-point Celtic sun is a symbol that is difficult to interpret due to the contradictory information. All depends on a myth you find. In one of the Druid myths the Sun symbolized Taranis, the Celtic god of sun, or Belenus, also a god of sun who like Apollo drove the sun across the sky it a chariot. What is in common is that the sun and the circle symbolize the endlessness of the Universe.

Here I also would like to mention one more popular Celtic tattoo design, the Labyrinth, a symbolic representation of way that leads us to our inner world and to spiritual basis of everything on the Earth. It symbolizes continuity and interdependence of all the things in the Universe.