Tau Cross Tattoo Meaning

Protection, humility, joyful poverty, and the oldest form of the cross.

The Tau Cross is the oldest form of the cross — the simple T-shape, the cross of Saint Francis and joyful poverty, the protective mark of the Hebrew letter Tav placed on the foreheads of the righteous, the sign of protection and humility older than the crucifix itself. To carry the Tau Cross is to carry protection, humility, joyful poverty, and the oldest form of the cross — the mark that spares the righteous, the emblem of radical simplicity, the T that came before the Latin cross.

The Tau cross — technically the crux commissa, the cross shaped like a capital T, with the crossbar at the very top of the upright — is above all the cross of Saint Francis of Assisi, and it remains the great emblem of the Franciscan movement to this day. Saint Francis loved the Tau and adopted it as his personal sign: he marked it on walls and doors, used it as his signature, and embraced it as the symbol of his whole way of life. For the Franciscans, the simple T-shape represents the heart of Francis's vision — radical poverty, joy in simplicity, and devotion to the cross of Christ.

The Tau is fitting for Francis precisely because of its plainness. It is the simplest possible form of the cross, humble and unadorned, perfectly suited to a saint who renounced all wealth and possessions to live in joyful poverty and simplicity, finding his riches in God and in all creation rather than in things. The Tau also represents the embrace of the cross — the taking-up of Christ's cross as the pattern of one's life — in a form that recalls the cross before the elaborate crucifixion imagery was added to it: the cross as a simple sign of self-giving and devotion. For Francis and his followers, to wear the Tau is to profess the Franciscan ideals: poverty, humility, simplicity, joy, and the wholehearted embrace of the cross of Christ. The Tau is the cross of Saint Francis — the simple T-shape of Franciscan poverty, humility, and joy. The Christian Tau cross is the cross of Saint Francis — the Tau cross (crux commissa) as the cross of Saint Francis of Assisi, the Franciscan emblem, worn as a simple T-shape to represent radical poverty, joy in simplicity, and the embrace of the cross; the simplest, humblest form of the cross, perfectly suited to a saint who renounced all wealth to live in joyful poverty, recalling the cross before the elaborate crucifixion imagery was added — to wear the Tau is to profess the Franciscan ideals of poverty, humility, simplicity, and devotion.

The Tau cross takes its name from the Greek letter tau (T), which corresponds to the Hebrew letter tav — the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In Ezekiel 9:4 (written before the Babylonian captivity, when the ancient Hebrew tav was written as an X or T shape), God instructs an angel to mark the foreheads of the righteous in Jerusalem with this letter, sparing them from the coming destruction. Early Christian commentators noted the similarity between this protective mark and the shape of the cross, making the tau a pre-figuration of Christian salvation. Saint Francis of Assisi adopted the tau as his personal symbol — he signed letters with it, painted it on the walls of his cells, and wore it as an emblem of his radical embrace of apostolic poverty. The Franciscan order has used it ever since.

Tau Cross across cultures

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