Harp Tattoo Meaning

Harmony, elegance, music, and the grace of strings.

The Dagda's harp came when he called it.

The magical harp of the Dagda — the chief god of the Irish Tuatha Dé Danann — was called Uaithne, which meant 'oak of two greens' or simply the name of the harpist himself, the traditions tangling the instrument and the player until they were the same word. When the Fomorians stole it during a battle, the Dagda went to their hall and called it by name. The harp flew to him through the hall, killing nine Fomorians on its way, and when he played it he played the three strains that every Celtic harp could play: goltrai, the music of weeping; geantrai, the music of laughter; suantrai, the music of sleep. He played them in sequence and the Fomorians wept and laughed and slept, and in their sleep the Dagda and his companions escaped.

David played the harp for Saul when the evil spirit troubled him. The music drove the spirit away — not through any magical property of the notes but through the specific quality of David's playing, which the text describes as skilled, and the spirit's response to it, which was flight. The harp as the instrument that could move what would not be moved by anything else.

Orpheus played a lyre, which is a harp's cousin, and moved stones and trees with it, calmed rivers, made the wild animals lie down. He walked into the underworld and played for Hades and Persephone and they wept — which is the most remarkable fact in the myth, that the king and queen of the dead, who had presumably heard every grief there was, wept at the music of a man who had lost his wife.

The harp is the instrument of what cannot be said. The three strains of the Dagda's harp are the complete emotional vocabulary: grief, joy, rest. Everything else is a variation.

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