Is getting a tattoo a sin?
Short answer
The Bible does not address tattooing as we know it today. The one passage about marks on the body is Leviticus 19:28, addressed to Israel in a context of ritual mourning and cults of the dead. No New Testament text returns to it, and Christians disagree on how far that law reaches. The decision rests on individual conscience.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 3 min read
The question almost always arrives after someone has quoted an isolated verse, and almost always without the context that changes how it reads. It is worth starting with what the text says, before arguing about what it means today.
The prohibition appears exactly once in the whole Bible, inside a list of practices tied to mourning rituals and to the cults of the dead among Israel’s neighbours. The verse just before it forbids specific cuts to the hair and the beard, of the same kind. Anyone reading the full chapter sees that the subject there is not bodily aesthetics: it is religious boundary.
The New Testament never comes back to it — neither to permit nor to forbid. That matters, because it does explicitly revisit several other points of the Levitical law, arguing which ones remain and which do not. The silence about marks on the body is what pushes this into the territory of conscience, and it is also why sincere Christians land in different places.
What the passages say
28You shall not cut your flesh for the dead, and you shall not make other figures or marks on yourself. I am the Lord.
The single passage about marks on the body. It sits inside a list of mourning and death-cult practices, right after the ban on ritual cutting of hair and beard — which places the prohibition in the field of rite rather than appearance.
19Or do you not know that your bodies are the Temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?
20For you have been bought at a great price. Glorify and carry God in your body.
The argument most used by those who hold that tattoos should be avoided: the body described as a temple. Worth noting that the subject of the passage, in context, is sexual immorality — bringing it here is an application, not a direct citation.
4Who are you to judge the servant of another? He stands or falls by his own Lord. But he shall stand. For God is able to make him stand.
Paul is dealing with practices on which honest Christians disagreed, and he puts the judgement out of third-party reach: each answers to their own Lord. It is the passage that gives shape to individual conscience on matters Scripture leaves open.
7And the Lord said to Samuel: “You should not look with favor on his face, nor on the height of his stature. For I have rejected him. Neither do I judge by the appearance of a man. For man sees those things that are apparent, but the Lord beholds the heart.”
The contrast between what shows on the outside and what God looks at. It is not a verse about tattoos, and quoting it as if it were would strain the text — it belongs here as the general biblical criterion of assessment that any answer to this question has to reckon with.