The Devil Tattoo Meaning
Bondage, temptation, the shadow, and the chains loose enough to remove.
The Devil is the tarot's card of bondage and the shadow — card XV, the horned Baphomet on his black throne with two figures chained beneath him, the embodiment of temptation, attachment, and self-imposed captivity. Its deepest secret is in the chains: they hang loose, and the captives could slip free if only they looked up and saw it. To carry the Devil is to carry bondage, temptation, and the shadow — the attachments and compulsions that bind us, the desires and fears that feel like necessity, and the liberating truth that the chains we wear are looser than we think, removable the moment we choose to see them.
The Devil is card XV of the tarot's Major Arcana, and its image is deliberately unsettling. The horned, goat-headed figure of Baphomet — part man, part beast, with bat-like wings — sits enthroned upon a black cube, an inverted torch or raised hand casting a baleful light, a reversed pentagram above his brow. Chained to the cube beneath him stand two naked human figures, a man and a woman, with small horns and tails of their own, bound by chains around their necks. They appear to be his prisoners, trapped in bondage to the dark lord.
But the most important detail is easy to miss, and it transforms the card's meaning: the chains around the captives' necks hang loose. They are not locked or tight; the figures could simply lift them off and walk away — if only they looked up long enough to notice that they could. Their bondage is, in truth, a bondage they could end at any moment, held in place not by the Devil's power but by their own failure to see that they are free to leave. The chains are real, but the captivity is chosen, or at least unexamined. The tarot Devil is Baphomet and the loose chains — card XV, the horned figure on the black cube with two captives chained beneath him, whose chains hang loose enough to remove, revealing that their bondage is one they could end the moment they looked up and saw it.
The Rider-Waite Devil is modeled on the image of Baphomet — the composite figure (human torso, goat head, wings, horns, one arm raised and one lowered in a reversal of the Magician's pose) that appeared in Eliphas Lévi's Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854). Below the Devil are a man and woman chained to his throne — they are the same figures as the Lovers card (card VI), now chained. The chains around their necks are loose — they could remove them. The man has grown a tail of flame; the woman has grown a tail of grapes — they are becoming more like the Devil, more bestial, more material, more addicted. The card represents not external evil but unconscious bondage — the chains we wear because we believe we cannot remove them.
The Devil across cultures
The Tattoo Concept Builder walks you from feeling to symbol to a concept you can take to your artist — built from your story, not a Pinterest board.
Build your concept →