Sanskrit Tattoo Designs: Bring This Ancient Language Back to Life As a Tattoo on Your Skin

After many decades in the shadows, it is now okay for ordinary people to sport tattoos again. For a long time only punks and gangsters had tattoos, but in the last few years Hollywood stars have been popularizing these beautiful body art. Many of these modern tattoos are small and elegant - Sanskrit tattoo designs, Celtic cross tattoos, rose and flower tattoos, etc.

Whether or not you are spiritual and religious, whether or not you love art and history, Sanskrit tattoo designs are always an interesting topic for discussion. Sanskrit is an ancient language, originally used for the Hindu religion. It has been conclusively dated back to at least 1500 BC. Due to its religious origins, there are many famous and historically important religious texts and divine mythologies in Sanskrit. Among these is one of the oldest surviving and complete religious works, the Rig Veda. The Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad-gita are famous epic poems which record the great deeds of the Hindu Gods and ancient heroes. Besides the Hindu religion, the Buddhist religion also uses Sanskrit (a version called Pali).

This ancient divine language is ideal for expressing your thanks to the Higher Powers for the good things in your life. Being grateful for what you have is one of the proven ways to get more of the same, and there is no better way of showing your gratitude than with a tattoo permanently on your skin. Such a tattoo help you to always keep your gratitude in memory. Tattoo designs for this can feature prayers of thanks taken from the Rig Veda and other Hindu and Buddhist sutras. Besides prayers of thanks and gratitude, you can also tattoo prayers asking for divine blessings or protection. Hinduism and Buddhism, like the other major religions in the world, have many beautiful and effective prayers which you can use in your tattoos.

Many linguists also believe that Sanskrit is the mother of all languages. In fact, the father of comparative linguistics and founder of the field Indo-European studies, Sir William Jones, proclaimed in 1786 that Sanskrit, ancient Greek and Latin must have shared the same even more ancient ancestral language. He made this assertion following his discovery of many common elements in all three languages, which he said were unlikely to have arisen independently.

We sometimes hear about how the Chinese I-Ching is the basis for the binary system used in computer technology. However, not many know about Sanskrit's role. Sanskrit has a carefully regulated grammar, unlike any other human language. From this grammar, we can trace the Backus-Naur form used to design modern higher order computer languages. Any student of Computer Science will easily recognize the similarities between the grammar of Sanskrit and the syntax of the programming languages he learned in university.

There are many different forms of Sanskrit tattoo designs, ranging from calligraphic drawings of Sanskrit alphabets like Om, all the way to magnificent and colorful body art inspired by epic poems like the Ramayana and Mahabharata. There is great flexibility and the only limit is your imagination and the skill of your tattoo artist.