Pomegranate Tattoo Meaning
Abundance, fertility, the underworld, and the fruit of both life and death.
Break open a pomegranate and it spills hundreds of jewel-red seeds packed into a single rind — and that image of countless lives held in one body made it, across the ancient world, the supreme fruit of fertility, abundance, and the many gathered into one. But it grows close to a darker meaning too: its blood-red juice and its seeds bound the goddess of spring to the land of the dead and gave the world winter. The pomegranate is abundance and the underworld at once — the fruit packed with more life than you can count, that also knows the way down into the dark, and back.
Persephone, daughter of the harvest goddess Demeter, was carried off by Hades to be queen of the underworld. Demeter's grief was so total that she let the whole earth go barren — nothing grew, and humanity began to starve — until the gods forced a compromise: Persephone could return to her mother. But there was a rule older than the gods themselves: anyone who ate the food of the dead could never fully leave the underworld. And Persephone had eaten — a few pomegranate seeds, given to her by Hades, knowingly or not, in the dark.
Because of those seeds — six, or three, or however many the version counts — she was bound to return to the underworld for a portion of every year. And so the seasons were born: when Persephone descends to Hades, her mother grieves and the world goes cold and barren; when she returns, spring comes. The pomegranate is the fruit that explains winter — the few red seeds eaten in the dark that tie the bringer of spring to the land of the dead forever, so that the world must die a little each year and be reborn.
The pomegranate (Punica granatum) originated in the region from Iran to the Himalayas and has been cultivated for at least 5,000 years. The number of seeds in a pomegranate was traditionally counted for divination — 613, which was believed to equal the number of commandments in the Torah. Each seed is surrounded by a red aril (the edible part) — the fruit contains between 200 and 1,400 seeds depending on the variety. The pomegranate appears in Egyptian tomb paintings, Mesopotamian cylinder seals, Greek art, Islamic architecture (the arabesque pattern that tiles many mosque surfaces is derived from the pomegranate flower), and on the pillars of Solomon's Temple. It is the fruit most associated with the threshold between worlds: the Persephone myth makes it the fruit of the underworld, the fruit that binds the eater to a realm they visited voluntarily.
Pomegranate across cultures
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