What Does Your Ogham Tattoo Mean?

How Ogham Characters Work

Ogham is an alphabet, not a symbol system. Each character — called a fid — represents a specific sound, not a concept or idea. A stroke to the right of the stem line is B. Five strokes to the right is Q. Diagonal strokes crossing the line are vowels.

This means an Ogham tattoo spells out a word phonetically, exactly as a Latin-alphabet tattoo would. There is no hidden mystical meaning embedded in the characters themselves — the meaning comes from the word or name being spelled.

This is important because it means every Ogham tattoo can be read and verified by anyone who knows the alphabet. There are no ambiguous symbols. Either the characters spell your intended word, or they don't.

The 25 Ogham Characters

The standard Ogham alphabet has 25 letters arranged in five groups called aicmí. The first 20 are the original alphabet; the final five (forfeda) were added later for sounds not in Old Irish.

Read the full alphabet guide — each letter's tree name, historical sound value, and modern usage.

Transliteration vs Translation

Most Ogham tattoos use transliteration — the process of mapping the sounds of a modern English or Irish name onto the closest Ogham characters. This is not the same as translation.

For example, the name Emma would be transliterated as ᚓᚋᚋᚐ (E-M-M-A) — the Ogham characters that represent those sounds. There is no "word for Emma" in Old Irish; the script simply spells the name phonetically.

Irish-language words can be more directly represented, since Ogham was designed for Old Irish phonology. The word grá (love) transliterates cleanly to ᚌᚏᚐ. Common concepts like clann (family), neart (strength), and síocháin (peace) all work well.

How to Decode an Existing Ogham Tattoo

If you have an Ogham tattoo and want to verify what it says — or if you've seen one and want to read it — the process is straightforward:

1. Orient the image so the stem line runs vertically, with the inscription reading bottom-to-top.
2. Identify the stem line — the central vertical line from which strokes extend.
3. Count and identify each group of strokes: strokes to the right = B-aicme (B, L, F, S, N); strokes to the left = H-aicme (H, D, T, C, Q); strokes diagonally = M-aicme (M, G, NG, STR, R); strokes crossing the line = vowels (A, O, U, E, I).
4. Map each character to its sound using the table above.
5. Read the resulting phonetic sequence as the intended word or name.

If you're unsure, use our free Ogham translator — type the word you think the tattoo says and compare the generated characters with what's on your skin.