What about tattoos?

Question 12004

Christians and tattoos is a subject that produces a good deal of confident assertion and rather little careful reading. One verse gets quoted, the conversation stops, and a young believer with a cross on his forearm is left feeling that he has done something shameful. I think we can do better than that.

My conclusion, which I will defend rather than simply announce, is that this belongs to Christian liberty and that the interesting questions are not the ones usually asked. Let me start with the verse everybody reaches for.

The one verse in the Bible

Leviticus 19:28 says: you shall not make any cuts on your body for the dead or tattoo yourselves: I am the LORD. That is the only reference in Scripture, and the whole discussion about Christians and tattoos rests on how we read it.

Two things are worth noticing immediately. The prohibition is tied to a specific practice, marks made for the dead, which points to Canaanite mourning rituals in which the living cut and marked themselves for departed relatives or for the gods of the dead. The Hebrew term rendered tattoo, qa’aqa, appears nowhere else in the Old Testament, which limits how confident anyone can be about its precise scope.

The second is the setting. The surrounding verses forbid breeding two kinds of cattle together, sowing a field with two kinds of seed, wearing cloth made of two materials, trimming the edges of the beard, and eating meat with blood in it. Anyone who quotes verse 28 as binding while wearing a cotton and polyester shirt has some explaining to do.

Why the Mosaic law does not settle it

The strongest reason the verse cannot settle the question of Christians and tattoos is that the believer today is not under the law of Moses. That law was given as the national covenant of Israel, and Israel and the church are distinct in God’s programme. Paul says we are not under law but under grace, and Colossians 2 warns against being judged in matters of food and drink and festivals, which were a shadow of things to come.

This does not mean the Old Testament is useless to us. Where a command reflects the unchanging character of God it is restated in the New Testament, and nine of the ten commandments are. But the tattoo prohibition is never repeated, and the apostles addressing Gentile converts in Acts 15 listed what mattered and did not include it.

The underlying principle does carry over, and it is worth stating. Israel was to be distinct from the nations around her, and her worship was not to borrow the marks of pagan religion. That principle is live for us. The question for Christians and tattoos is therefore whether a particular tattoo carries that kind of religious meaning, not whether ink under skin is inherently defiling.

The temple argument, examined

The second argument usually offered is 1 Corinthians 6:19: your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own. It is a magnificent verse and it is regularly pressed into service on this question.

Read the context, though. Paul is arguing against sexual immorality, specifically against Corinthian believers using prostitutes. The point is that the body belongs to the Lord and must not be joined to sin, not that its surface must remain unaltered. If the verse forbade permanent marking, it would equally forbid ear piercing, cosmetic surgery and a surgeon’s scar.

What the verse does establish is a serious attitude to the body, and that has real application here. Christians and tattoos should be thought about with the same care as anything else done to a body that belongs to God. Care is not the same as prohibition.

Christians and tattoos: the questions that matter

Having cleared away the two proof texts, here is where I think the real work lies. What does the design say? A tattoo is a public statement, and some designs carry meanings a believer should want no part of: occult symbols, gang affiliations, images that degrade women, the name of someone you are not married to. The content matters far more than the medium.

What is the motive? If it is defiance of parents, or a desperate attempt to be noticed, or an effort to fill an emptiness that ink will not touch, then the tattoo is a symptom and the symptom is the thing to address. If it commemorates something meaningful or is simply an enjoyment of beauty, that is a different matter entirely.

And the practical question that many people skip: it is permanent, expensive to remove, and the person you will be at fifty may not share the enthusiasms of the person you are at nineteen. That is not a moral argument, it is common sense, and common sense is not the enemy of faith.

Conscience, culture and the family

Romans 14:5 says each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. If you cannot do this with a clear conscience, do not do it, because acting against conscience is itself sin whatever the object happens to be. My answer on the conscience works through why that matters.

Consider the people around you as well. Ephesians tells children to honour their parents, and a young person still under their roof should weigh that seriously rather than treating it as an obstacle. Consider also your witness in your particular setting, since a tattoo carries a different social meaning in a rural chapel than it does in a city centre congregation, and neither meaning is fixed forever.

Older believers, for their part, should be careful not to elevate cultural taste into a doctrine. The generation that regarded tattoos as the mark of a criminal is not describing the world their grandchildren live in. Christians and tattoos will look different to different generations, and only one of those differences is theological.

A word about how we argue this

I want to say something about the manner of the disagreement, because it does more damage than the disagreement itself. Discussions about Christians and tattoos have a habit of becoming a proxy for something larger: a suspicion about modern culture, an anxiety about young people, a sense that standards are slipping generally. The tattoo is simply where that feeling finds a target.

If that is what is really going on, then arguing about Leviticus will settle nothing, because Leviticus was never the reason. It would be more honest, and considerably more fruitful, to talk about the underlying worry directly. Older believers often have wisdom worth hearing on that, and it is lost when it arrives dressed as a proof text.

The reverse applies too. A young Christian who wants a tattoo chiefly to demonstrate that he is not like the fussy people at church has made his tattoo about them rather than about himself, which is a poor reason to mark your body permanently. Freedom exercised to make a point is not really freedom.

If you already have one

A good many Christians came to faith with tattoos already on their skin, some of them from a life they would rather forget. Let me be plain: you are not required to have anything removed, and no elder should be looking at your arms. You were washed and made new, and the past those marks belong to has been dealt with at the cross.

Where a design is genuinely offensive or connected to something occult, covering it or having it removed may be a wise step for your own peace, and some believers do choose that. It is a matter of freedom rather than obligation, and nobody should be pressed into it.

What no church should ever do is treat visible ink as evidence of a shallow faith. I have known men with sleeves of tattoos who prayed with more reality than anyone in the room. When Christians and tattoos come up in a congregation, judging by appearance is specifically condemned in James 2, and that passage was written about clothing rather than skin only because the first century had not thought of the alternative.

So, now what?

If you are considering a tattoo, wait six months and see whether you still want the same design. Talk to your parents if you are young enough for that to be the right thing. Ask yourself what the image says and why you want it said, and if you cannot answer that without embarrassment, leave it.

And if you have strong feelings about other people’s tattoos, this might be a good week to examine where those feelings come from. The subject of Christians and tattoos is a small one, and it has consumed a strange amount of energy that could have gone somewhere useful. What are the matters your church should be spending that energy on instead? See also my answers on Christian ethics and on alcohol.

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. (1 Corinthians 6:19-20, ESV)