Ram Skull Meaning: The Ram and Goat Skull in Faith, Art and Tattoos

Horned skulls travel well. The same curve of horn shows up in a Jewish ritual object, an Egyptian amulet, a medieval astrological vessel, a French occult drawing and a Santa Fe living room. The meanings do not travel with it automatically, so it helps to see them side by side.

So, a ram skull tattoo is never "just" one thing, which is part of its appeal. The sections below tell each story with its names and dates.

The oldest written ram in this story stands in a thicket. In Genesis 22:13, Abraham looks up and sees "a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns," in the wording of the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. He offers the ram in place of his son Isaac.

In Jewish tradition that ram is connected to the shofar, the ram's horn sounded at Rosh Hashanah. The Talmud, in Rosh Hashanah 16a, gives the reason in God's voice: "Sound before Me a ram's horn, so that I will remember for you the binding of Isaac, son of Abraham, in whose stead a ram was sacrificed." Chabad explains why shofars are made from rams' horns in light of that binding, known in Hebrew as the Akedah.

In Jewish interpretation, the ram and its horn stand for substitution, remembrance, divine mercy, repentance and the renewal of the covenant. These meanings belong to Jewish religious practice, and they live in the horn and the sound of it, not in a skull on a shelf. If the Genesis ram is the reason you are drawn to the image, that is a story worth knowing well before you wear it.

Long before most of the other meanings here, Egyptians linked the ram with Amun. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes Amun as a major god whose cult began at Thebes and spread widely during the New Kingdom, when he became one of Egypt's most important deities.

Small ram-head amulets carried that devotion close to the body. The Met's ram's-head amulet entry explains that such amulets, made in Egypt and Kush, called Amun to mind, because the god was believed to show himself in the form of a ram. The museum connects examples with Egypt's Twenty-fifth Dynasty, when Nubian rulers controlled Egypt and Amun was also worshipped in Kush, in present-day Sudan.

That is a specific, dated religious use. It tells you what a ram's head meant to people in Thebes and Kush, not what every ram skull means today.

The ram as a zodiac sign is a separate tradition again. At the British Museum, the Vaso Vescovali, a vessel made around 1200 in Khurasan or Herat, shows a figure riding a ram. The figure stands for Mars in his night house, Aries, a piece of medieval Islamic astrological imagery.

So, when someone says their ram skull tattoo is "for Aries," they are standing in a long line of people who tied the ram to the sky. In older objects the ram can mean the zodiac sign, astrology or planetary magic, depending on where and when it was made.

The goat's most famous symbolic outing is much younger than any of the above. The French occultist Éliphas Lévi published *Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie* in two volumes between 1854 and 1856, and in it he drew a winged, goat-headed figure he called Baphomet and "the Sabbatic Goat." The 1856 image, now in the public domain on Wikimedia Commons, combines a goat's head, wings, breasts, a torch, a pentagram and other symbols. Julian Strube's study "The 'Baphomet' of Eliphas Lévi" looks at the figure closely.

Later occult groups, Satanic organizations and popular culture adapted the image in different ways, and that is why a goat skull now reads to many viewers as occult, rebellious or transgressive. Those readings are later interpretations built on a nineteenth-century drawing. They do not make goats, or goat skulls, a universal sign of Satanism, and they are a different thing from Egyptian ram worship or a shofar. If the occult side of skull imagery interests you, our story on skulls in witchcraft covers more of that history.

In the American Southwest, the bleached horned skull became a design object, and Georgia O'Keeffe is a big part of why. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum records that she collected bones in the New Mexico desert and called bleached bones "symbols of the desert." Her 1938 painting *Ram's Head, Blue Morning Glory* was inspired by a skull the museum later identified as a Spanish goat skull, so one of the most famous "ram" skulls in American art turns out to be a goat. In her work the skull is about the desert, beauty, mortality and what an artist can make of bone. The Met holds another of her desert bone paintings, *From the Faraway, Nearby*.

By the late 1980s the look had moved indoors. A February 4, 1988, *Los Angeles Times* report, "Dead Right", described bleached steer skulls turning up in Santa Fe restaurants, showrooms and homes, and said some people saw them as a symbol of the vanishing American West. Those were cattle skulls, not rams, but the ram and goat skulls on Southwestern walls today share that same desert-ranch mood. Our cow skull meaning story follows the cattle side, and deer skull meaning follows the antlered one.

Metal art loves a horned skull. Bands use horned, goat-headed and skull imagery to suggest extremity, danger, death, occult themes or plain theatrical rebellion, and a ram skull fits that kit perfectly. One concrete example: the metal band Orphaned Land was presented with an award shaped like a ram's skull, which Louder Sound shows in an interview with the band.

Album covers and stage sets are choices made by particular bands and artists, so the best way to read a horned skull on a record sleeve is to ask what that band meant by it. There is no single metal-wide meaning. For more on how darker skull styles are read, see our gothic skull meaning story.

For most people asking, this is the real question, and the answer is personal. The meanings people commonly give for ram skull tattoos include their Aries sign, strength, determination and endurance, mortality, rugged Western imagery, and a love of dark or metal style. Some wear one in memory of someone: one person who shared a ram skull tattoo online described it as a memorial to a sister who died, while another said the ram simply stood for being an Aries, with the symbols around it carrying a personal lesson.

What a ram skull tattoo should not be is automatically labeled. It is not Satanic, pagan, occult or spiritually protective unless the person wearing it says so. The wearer's own meaning is the one that counts, which is also good news if you are designing one: talk it over with your artist and decide which of these stories you want it to carry. Our skull tattoo meaning story covers other skull designs, and the wider skull symbolism guide shows how many meanings a skull can hold.

From a thicket in Genesis to Thebes, Herat, Lévi's France, New Mexico walls and the tattoo chair, the horned skull has carried a lot of different meanings without ever settling on one. That leaves you free to choose. Pick the story that fits you, tell your artist about it, and the ram will carry it. If you are decorating with horns and bone, our skull home decor story has more ideas.

---