Human
skulls and skeletons are one of the most common elements in the Grim
Reaper tattoos, due to the fact that skeletons and skulls have long been
associated with death and decay (sometimes Death himself is portrayed
as a skeleton).
Skull tattoos do represent death, but they
usually represent the fleetingness of life. Various Latin maxims and
aphorisms: Memento Mori (Remember your mortality, Remember you must die
or Remember you will die), Sic Transit Gloria Mundi (Thus passes the
glory of the world), Carpe Diem (Seize the day), Ubi sunt...? (Where
are...?) or Ubi nunc...? (Where now...?) - both of them are shortened
variants of the Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt? Where are those who were
before us?) are very often included in the skull tattoo designs; their
role is to remind us that Death comes to us all, and for this reason is
important to enjoy every moment of life.
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Seize
the day or die regretting - a tattoo design which contains flowers
(which symbolize brevity and the ephemeral nature of life) and a skull
As a symbol of the certainty of death, skulls are one of the most common symbols used in the Vanitas art
Despite the fact that the skull is often a
symbol of mortality, a design which depicts a skull backed by a pair of
wings (usually a pair of angelic wings, but this is not mandatory) is
rather a positive design with various meanings: resurrection; death is
the road to a new form of existence; the death frees one of the burdens
of life; the progression of the human soul through the afterlife.
Anyway, the winged skull is not always a positive design, having also
many negative connotations: danger, death (death which can reach
everyone everywhere), lawlessness (very common in the bikers-gang
tattoos)
The skull is also a symbol of the transitory
nature of life and death, and for this reason some designers choose to
include a skull into more complex designs which represent the infinite
cycle of the life and death.
