The Moon Tattoo Meaning

The unconscious, illusion, intuition, and the journey made without daylight.

The Moon is the tarot's card of the unconscious, illusion, and intuition — card XVIII, a moonlit path winding between two towers, past a howling dog and wolf, with a crayfish crawling from the water, everything bathed in a light that illuminates without making anything clear. It is the journey through the dark, the realm of dreams, fears, and half-seen truths. To carry the Moon is to carry the unconscious and the journey made without daylight — the path walked by uncertain moonlight through illusion, intuition, and hidden fears, the dissolving of the line between the known and the unknown, the descent into the dreaming dark.

The Moon is card XVIII of the tarot's Major Arcana, and its image is haunting and ambiguous: a moon — its face often shown with closed or downcast eyes, dripping dew — shines over a winding path that leads off into the distance between two tall towers. Beside the path, a dog and a wolf raise their heads and howl at the moon, and in the foreground a crayfish (or lobster) crawls up out of a pool of water onto the land. Everything is bathed in the moon's pale light — and yet nothing is truly clear; the scene is illuminated but uncertain, full of shadow and ambiguity.

Each element speaks of the unconscious and the unclear: the crayfish emerging from the water is a primal content rising from the depths of the unconscious; the dog and wolf are the tame and the wild, the conscious and the instinctual, both unsettled by the moonlight; the two towers are the gateposts of a threshold; and the winding path leads into the unknown. The Moon's light is not the sun's clarity but the deceptive, shifting light of night, in which familiar things look strange and the boundaries blur. The tarot Moon is the path between the towers — card XVIII, the moonlit winding path past the howling dog and wolf and the crayfish rising from the water, everything illuminated yet unclear, the haunting image of the unconscious and the uncertain night.

The Rider-Waite Moon shows the full moon in a sky with a face — it is the moon with awareness, watching. Below, a path runs from a pool (where a crayfish is emerging) through a landscape where a dog and a wolf flank the path, both howling, to two towers in the distance. Drops fall from the moon's surface. Everything is visible but distorted — the light of the moon is reflected light, not primary light, which is why the Moon is the card of illusion, of the things that seem clear in the dark that daylight reveals differently. The crayfish is the unconscious emerging from the deep. The dog and wolf are civilization and wildness, both activated by the same moonlight. She corresponds to Pisces in astrological tarot attribution.

The Moon across cultures

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