Capricorn tattoo ideas, meaning and designs

What people want from a Capricorn tattoo

The traits attached to Capricorn are discipline, patience, dry humour and an ambition that stays quiet. Clients usually want something that looks durable rather than decorative, which is why mountains, rope, stone texture and Saturn's rings show up so often alongside the sign. Saturn is the ruling planet in astrology, so the rings carry the reference on their own.

The two animal readings pull in opposite directions. A mountain goat on a ridge is a picture about climbing. A sea goat is stranger and older, half in water and half on land, and it gives an artist more to work with. Ask for the sea goat if you want a piece nobody else in the room has.

The glyph, the sea goat and the faint stars

The Capricorn glyph is the fussiest of the twelve. A sharp horn stroke drops down and turns into a loop that curls back on itself, and that loop closes up as ink spreads. Keep the whole mark at 3 cm or larger, and ask for at least a millimeter of open space inside the curl, or by year twenty you have a hook with a dot on the end.

The constellation gives you a wide shallow triangle of faint stars. Deneb Algedi at magnitude 2.85 is the brightest point and barely outshines its neighbours, so weighting one dot would be inaccurate here. Drawing them all at the same size is the honest version, and it happens to make a calm, even pattern that sits well on a forearm or a collarbone.

Ways people build it

• Glyph alone, 3 to 5 cm, wrist, forearm or behind the ear
• Constellation triangle at even dot weight, 10 cm or more
• Sea goat with a fish tail in black and grey, 15 cm minimum
• Mountain goat on a ridge line, 12 to 20 cm, calf or upper arm
• Glyph paired with Saturn and its rings, 8 to 12 cm

Size, placement and pain

The glyph needs a little more room than most, so treat 3 cm as the floor. The inner forearm is a good home for it at about 4 out of 10 for pain, as is the back of the arm at 3. Behind the ear is around 5 and the ankle 6. A shop minimum of $90 to $150 covers any of those.

The sea goat is an illustrative piece and wants a surface with both length and width, since the body curves. The thigh, the outer arm and the upper back all work at 15 to 25 cm, four to six hours, $450 to $800. The constellation triangle is wide rather than tall and suits the collarbone, the shoulder blade or the sternum.

Styles that suit it, and how it ages

Blackwork, geometric and black and grey realism all suit Capricorn, and etching or woodcut style linework is a good match for the sea goat, since the figure comes out of old engravings anyway. Fine line works for the constellation and for the glyph at 3 cm or above. Color is rare on this sign and most Capricorn pieces read better without it.

Scales are the aging problem. A fish tail drawn with small overlapping scales under 2 mm turns into texture and then into a grey mass over twenty years. Ask for larger scales with clear separation, or for the tail to be suggested with a few heavy curves. Take the design to a licensed artist who will scale the detail to where it sits and to how your skin holds a line.