Mandrake Tattoo Meaning

Magic, power, the uncanny, and the most potent root of Western lore.

The mandrake is the most magical and dreaded of plants — a root that grows in the rough shape of a human body, prized for fertility and used as a powerful anesthetic and poison, and believed to scream when torn from the earth with a cry that kills. Half plant, half humanoid, it sits at the border of medicine and magic, life and death. To carry the mandrake is to carry magic, fertility, and the perilous root — the human-shaped plant of fertility and sleep, healing and poison, the screaming root whose power is matched only by its danger.

The mandrake — the dudaim — appears in the Book of Genesis as a plant of fertility, the object of a poignant family bargain. Reuben, the son of Leah, finds mandrakes in the field during the wheat harvest and brings them to his mother. Rachel, Leah's sister and rival, who is barren and desperate for children, begs Leah for the mandrakes — and Leah agrees only in exchange for a night with their shared husband Jacob. The mandrakes were sought because they were believed to be a fertility medicine, a plant that could open the womb and grant children.

This ancient association of the mandrake with fertility, conception, and love ran throughout the old world: the root was thought to promote pregnancy and desire, and was used as an aphrodisiac and a fertility charm. In Genesis it is precious enough to trade a husband's company for, the plant that a longing woman believes might finally let her bear a child. The Hebrew mandrake is the fertility root of Genesis — the dudaim that Rachel craved and bargained for in her longing for children, the ancient plant believed to open the womb and grant conception, love, and fertility.

The mandrake (Mandragora officinarum) contains tropane alkaloids — atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine — that produce genuine pharmacological effects: in low doses, sedation and hallucination; in higher doses, delirium and death. Its root often forks into a shape resembling human legs, and the whole root can suggest a human body, which is why it was personified across the ancient world. The doctrine of signatures — the medieval belief that a plant's appearance indicated its medicinal use — made the human-shaped root the obvious plant for human medicine. Josephus, in the 1st century CE, described the elaborate protocol required to harvest mandrake safely. The plant was used as an anesthetic in surgery in the ancient world — combined with wine, it could render a patient unconscious. Shakespeare's Juliet takes mandrake (or something like it) to simulate death.

Mandrake across cultures

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