Tattoos and Christian faith

Christians are free to get tattoos, and many wear them as signs of faith: a cross on the wrist, a line of Scripture, the name of someone they love. If you are thinking about one, or already have one, the questions that matter are what it says, why you want it, and whether you have thought it through in prayer, because a tattoo, like any lasting choice, can be wise or foolish, kind or cruel.

What does Leviticus 19:28 say?

Leviticus 19:28 forbids cuttings in the flesh for the dead and adds, “nor tattoo any marks on you.” The verse before it forbids cutting the hair on the sides of the head and clipping the edge of the beard (Leviticus 19:27).

Scholars call Leviticus 17–26 the Holiness Code, because the whole section is built around one command: “You shall be holy; for I, the LORD your God, am holy” (Leviticus 19:2). Leviticus 19 mixes commands that Christians keep with commands that almost no Christian keeps. The same chapter that says “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) also forbids sowing a field with two kinds of seed and wearing “a garment made of two kinds of material” (Leviticus 19:19).

The ban on tattoos stands beside bans on trimming the beard and on gashing the skin “for the dead.” Similar laws in Leviticus 21:5 and Deuteronomy 14:1–2 forbid shaving and cutting the body in mourning, and Deuteronomy gives the reason: “you are a holy people to the LORD your God” (Deuteronomy 14:2). For that reason, many commentators have read Leviticus 19:28 as a ban on the mourning customs of Israel’s neighbors.

Not every scholar agrees. In a 2013 article in the journal Vetus Testamentum, John Huehnergard and Harold Liebowitz reported finding no evidence that people in the ancient Near East marked their skin to mourn the dead, and they argued that the law more likely forbade the marks used to brand slaves. On either reading, Leviticus 19:28 addressed a specific ancient practice: a mark of mourning or a mark of ownership.

Jewish tradition takes the verse seriously. The Mishnah, the code of Jewish law compiled around 200 CE, forbids a tattoo made by cutting the skin and filling the cut with ink (Makkot 3:6). One rabbi in that passage held that the law applies only to writing a name on the skin, and the Talmud explains the name as the name of an idol. Traditional Jewish law still forbids tattoos for Jews, and Christians should respect that practice as part of Israel’s faithfulness to God’s covenant.

Do Christians have to keep the laws of Leviticus?

The first Christians faced that question within about twenty years of Jesus’ death. Some believers taught that Gentile converts had to be circumcised, saying it was necessary “to command them to keep the law of Moses” (Acts 15:5). The apostles and elders met in Jerusalem, and their letter to the Gentile churches named only a few requirements:

For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from sexual immorality.

Acts 15:28–29, NRSVUE

Tattoos are not on the apostles’ list. Neither are pork, shellfish, or mixed fabrics. Paul stated the principle sharply in his letter to the Galatians:

For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

Galatians 5:1, NRSVUE

The Thirty-Nine Articles, the Church of England’s statement of faith from the sixteenth century, draw the same line. Article VII says that “the Law given from God by Moses, as touching Ceremonies and Rites, do not bind Christian men,” while the moral commandments still do. Christians keep “love your neighbor” because Jesus named it one of the two greatest commandments (Matthew 22:37–40). Christians do not keep the rules about beards, fabrics, and food that marked Israel out from the nations, and most churches place the rule about tattoos among those markers. For the same reason, the churches that let you eat pork also let you get a tattoo.

What does “your body is a temple” mean?

Many Christians who object to tattoos point to 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, where Paul calls the body “a temple of the Holy Spirit” and tells Christians to glorify God in their bodies.

Read in context, the passage is about sex. Paul was answering Christians in Corinth who said “All things are lawful for me” and who apparently saw nothing wrong with visiting prostitutes (1 Corinthians 6:12–18). Paul teaches that the body belongs to God, who “will also raise us up by his power” (6:14), so what you do with your body matters.

Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 6 never mention tattoos, yet they give a fair test for any tattoo: does it glorify God, or at least not dishonor God or your neighbor? A cross, a verse, or the name of someone you love can pass that test. A slogan that mocks other people, or an image that celebrates cruelty, cannot. The passage also counts against recklessness with your body, such as a tattoo from an unclean shop or one chosen while drunk.

Have Christians always had tattoos?

Not everywhere, but for a very long time. The prophet Isaiah imagined people marking themselves as God’s own:

This one will say, “I am the Lord’s”; another will be called by the name of Jacob; yet another will write on the hand, “The Lord’s,” and adopt the name of Israel.

Isaiah 44:5, NRSVUE

The Christian scholar Procopius of Gaza (about 475–538 CE), commenting on Isaiah 44:5, mentioned Christians in the Holy Land who had crosses tattooed on their wrists. Paul himself wrote, “I bear the marks of the Lord Jesus branded on my body” (Galatians 6:17). His Greek word, stigmata, was the ordinary term for marks branded, cut, or tattooed on slaves. Paul probably meant the scars of his beatings (2 Corinthians 11:24–25), but he chose a slave’s mark to say that he belonged to Christ.

Coptic Christians in Egypt have long tattooed a small cross on the wrist. An Egyptian Christian woman interviewed for an oral-history project at the University of Sussex remembered: “we all engraved crosses on our wrists so that it is manifest to all that we are Christians.” The historian Mordechay Lewy, a former Israeli ambassador to the Holy See, has described the same custom of permanent crosses among Coptic, Ethiopian, and Armenian Christians in the Holy Land.

Western pilgrims to Jerusalem took up the custom. Lewy found a reference from 1484 to marks given to pilgrims, and accounts of Crusaders and pilgrims coming home with tattoos from the Holy Land continue into the eighteenth century. The best-known Jerusalem tattoo shop belongs to the Razzouk family, Coptic Christians whose ancestors came from Egypt. The family counts about 27 generations of tattooists, and its shop in the Old City still prints designs onto the skin with carved olive-wood stamps, one of which bears the date 1749 in Armenian script. Pilgrims from many churches still come to the Razzouk shop for crosses and other Christian designs.

What do the churches teach about tattoos?

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Methodist Church, and the Episcopal Church have no rule against tattoos. Paul gives the test that applies instead: “Love doesn’t harm a neighbor. Love therefore is the fulfillment of the law” (Romans 13:10). A tattoo that expresses hatred or contempt cannot meet that test and is a sin against love; a cross on the wrist harms no one.

Some Christians, especially in conservative churches, believe that Leviticus 19:28 still binds Christians, or that any permanent mark dishonors the body God made, and their reverence for Scripture and for the body is a good instinct. Paul tells Christians who disagree about such matters, “let’s not judge one another any more” (Romans 14:13). When Samuel judged Jesse’s sons by their looks, God told him that “the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7), and that holds for people with tattoos and people without them.

How should a Christian decide about a tattoo?

A tattoo is permanent, so it deserves the thought you would give any lasting decision. These questions help:

• What does it say? Words and images that honor God, remember someone you love, or mark a turning point in your life fit a Christian conscience. Images of hatred, cruelty, or contempt do not.
• Why do you want it? A tattoo chosen in grief, gratitude, or faith is different from one chosen on a dare.
• Will you still want it in twenty years? Removal is possible, but it is costly and often painful.
• Is the shop clean and licensed? Caring for your health is part of honoring a body that belongs to God.
• Will it wound someone you love? Paul asked Christians to “be careful that by no means does this liberty of yours become a stumbling block to the weak” (1 Corinthians 8:9).

If you already have a tattoo that you regret because of what it says, God’s forgiveness reaches that regret as it reaches every other. For the related question of what happens to the body after death, see Is cremation a sin?

Scripture’s most moving image of a mark on the skin belongs to God. To a people who felt forgotten in exile, God promised through Isaiah, “Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands” (Isaiah 49:16). Whatever marks you carry or choose, your name is already written there.