Grasshopper Tattoo Meaning
Forward leaps, progress, freedom, and moving on in great bounds.
Aesop's grasshopper sang all summer while the ant worked.
When winter came, the grasshopper was cold and hungry and went to the ant for help. The ant asked: what did you do all summer? The grasshopper said: I sang. The ant said: then dance now, and closed the door.
This is the version that survived into the Western moral tradition — the grasshopper as the symbol of improvidence, of pleasure chosen over preparation, of the person who will be punished for enjoying the present at the expense of the future.
But there is an older grasshopper story. Tithonus was the mortal lover of Eos, the goddess of dawn, who asked Zeus to give him immortality. She forgot to ask for eternal youth. Tithonus lived forever, aging continuously, shrinking and shriveling until there was almost nothing left of him — and Zeus, taking pity, transformed him into a grasshopper. The creature that chirps forever, that cannot die, that fills the late summer air with the sound of a very old voice.
The grasshopper in ancient Greece was the symbol of the Athenians — they wore golden grasshopper pins in their hair to show they were autochthonous, sprung from the earth itself, native to the land they lived on. The grasshopper was not frivolous. It was aristocratic proof of origin.
The grasshopper as a tattoo is for the person who has made peace with the summer. Who sang while there was summer to sing in, and who understands that the ant's winter is coming for everyone, and that the singing was still worth it.
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