The Meaning of the Spider Tattoo

For the most part of documented past centuries, human beings have embossed tattoos on their bodies for a foray of reasons ranging from magical protection, relieving pain, vengeance to declaring victory against a foe. Historical analysis credits tattoos to have been created to display beauty, valor, group solidarity, religious belief, shock and personal independence. Recent research has indicated that over 60% of the North American youths aged between 18 to 30 years old have at least a single tattoo on their body.

Among the most popular tattoo designs in the world, the spider tattoo is a symbol crossing over numerous tattoo genres. The spider tattoo is believed to have originated from one indigenous tribe of Malaysia. It is therefore strongly featured by most tribal tattoos of various indigenous tribes around the world. Very few cultures fail to have tales about spiders constituted in their mythologies, maybe because spiders inhabit almost all corners of the globe. Struggle in the web of life's intricacies is basically what a spider tattoo symbolizes.

In some tribes, the spider tattoos represents incarcerated capture while the different strands making up the web implies a metaphor symbolizing bars. In the Western countries, these bars are associated with crime, which depicts how long one has stayed behind prison walls. The tattoo is a symbol of a struggling generation; a struggle with drugs, struggle against the political system, while some people are always struggling against the oddity of life. And so no matter how long and much your struggle is, you find yourself entangled in the web of life. Thus from a Nazi want to-be with a spider tattoo on his cheek to a Latino on the street with the same feature on his neck, it basically draws to the same meaning, the spider tattoo is not an entity belonging to any specific group but to all whom the tentacles of life holds in the sublimes of a web.

Some bikers see the spider tattoo as a representation of fate, where the eventual web emanating from the activities of a spider shows how everyday we are tangled in the web of destiny. In short, this means being caught in a myriad of situations that one cannot contain, as life surely is.

The spider tattoo has been associated with a lot of things in the world today. For some, thee tattoo can only be a representation of the time you spent behind bars in prison, while others perceive it as a person whose web of life crossed path with the KKK. The same tattoo on the elbow would occur as implying a skinhead who have issues with his environment, a derelict and an anti-everything person; anti racist, anti gay, as well as a rubber stamp of a skinhead in prison behind the shadow of death on death row, murder depicted on the forehead. For other type of societal menace, it's just a reminder to them and others that they had the pleasure of serving a sentence for a specific number of years. It would not be a surprise if the spider tattoos does not fall short of depicting the number of people whom one has given an express ticket to the labyrinth of death.

For centuries, the spiders tattoo has drawn connotations from popular cultures, mythologies with a dose of symbolism being the outcome. That's is reason why today lots of spider tattoo fanatics have these inscriptions derived from the imagery of the day, such as the character Shelob from the depth of the movie the lord of the rings and the spider man movie and comic literature, giving them such a macho tattoo and a better representation of their personal belief. A rebellious Belief seen in the traits of a spider, a symbol of patience due to the hunting technique it uses and the way it waits for its prey after setting up a web, and also a dose of malice and mischief from its poison and fatal venom. These traits are adopted by many in the face of spider tattoos as their spirits rise up against the institutions of the day. That's why the adage of the spider tattoos will forever be span in every era within the web of life.