Daffodil Tattoo Meaning

Rebirth, spring, return from the underworld, and the bloom of Narcissus.

The daffodil is the first flower of spring — the bold yellow trumpet that pushes up through the cold bare ground and blooms before almost anything else, announcing that winter is broken and life returns. That early, defiant blooming made it the flower of rebirth and return; its Greek name, narcissus, ties it to one of mythology's most haunting tales and to the threshold of the underworld itself. To carry the daffodil is to carry rebirth and return — the first bloom of spring rising from the dead ground, the flower that comes back no matter how hard the winter, the promise of new beginnings and life renewed.

The daffodil's botanical name, narcissus, comes from the Greek youth Narcissus — a young man so beautiful, and so cold to those who loved him, that he was punished by being made to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool. Unable to embrace the face he saw in the water, unable to tear himself away, he wasted away at the water's edge and died there; and where he died, the flower sprang up — the narcissus, which bends always toward the water, head bowed, forever gazing down at its own reflection.

The same flower stands at the door of the underworld in another myth: in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, it was a narcissus of extraordinary beauty, planted by the gods as a lure, that drew the maiden Persephone away from her companions — and when she reached to pluck it, the earth split open and Hades carried her down to the land of the dead. So the daffodil is both the flower of fatal self-absorption and the bloom that stands at the threshold of the underworld, the beautiful lure at the edge of death. The Greek daffodil is the flower of Narcissus and the underworld's threshold — sprung where the self-loving youth wasted away, and the fatal bloom that lured Persephone down into the land of the dead.

The narcissus (Narcissus pseudonarcissus and related species) contains alkaloids including lycorine and galantamine — the latter is now used in Alzheimer's treatment; the flower of forgetting and self-absorption accidentally contains a compound that fights the forgetting of dementia. Wordsworth's I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (1807 CE) describes a field of daffodils encountered on a walk and the way the memory of that encounter returned — 'they flash upon that inward eye / which is the bliss of solitude' — making the daffodil the flower of pleasurable involuntary memory, the thing that comes back to you unbidden. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (7th–6th century BCE) specifies that the narcissus was specially created by Gaia at Zeus's request to lure Persephone — it was beautiful and strange, with a hundred blooms from a single stem, its scent reaching sky and sea.

Daffodil across cultures

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