Tattoo Magick with Jake Morningstar

Can your tattoos actually be doing magickal work?

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That's the question at the center of my conversation with Jake Morningstar, an inked witch of over twenty years and the author of the brand new book Tattoo Magick. Jake reached out to me for an endorsement because I'm one of the rare people who's both a witch and a former tattoo artist, and I loved the book so much I told him I wished I'd had it twenty-five years ago. This conversation ended up covering a lot more ground than I expected, and honestly, it changed how I think about some of my own ink.

How Jake Realized His Tattoos Were Magickal

Jake's first tattoo, at twenty-one, symbolized his own mental health recovery. His second tattoo is the one that changed everything. He wanted a minimalist way to mark the traumatic things he'd overcome, so he chose triangles, fourteen of them, across his chest. Over the following years, as he built out his own magickal practice using shapes in his sigil work, he kept noticing that triangles showed up in spells related to strength, even though neither triangles nor the number three have any traditional connection to strength in numerology. It took him a while to realize what was happening. His triangle tattoo had become his personal symbol for strength, because getting it had actually made him stronger. That realization is what sent him down the path toward everything in this book.

The Book That Almost Didn't Exist

The book Jake originally pitched to Llewellyn wasn't Tattoo Magick at all. It was a much longer manuscript, over ninety thousand words, on how to create your own deities. His acquisitions editor told him it was too niche, and asked what other ideas he had. He didn't actually have any. He stalled for a day, then threw together a list and added "tattoo magick" almost as an afterthought at the bottom. His editor came back immediately and said that was the one they wanted. A lot of the material on what you can do with already healed tattoos was stuff Jake had already worked out over the years, but the material on raising energy and setting up ritual space in the middle of getting tattooed took a concentrated sprint of getting a lot of tattoos in a short window to fully develop.

Working With Your Tattoo Artist

One thing Jake was clear about is that consent and communication matter here. His approach is straightforward honesty. He tells his tattoo artist plainly that he's going to be doing his own thing, quietly holding space and working with intention while they tattoo him, and that they don't need to be involved unless they want to be. In his experience, and in mine too, most tattoo artists are genuinely easygoing about this, whether they practice witchcraft themselves or not. Jake said it best: most of them respond with some version of "we're all a little pagan deep down."

Pain as a Spiritual Tool

This was the part of the conversation that hit hardest for me personally. Jake talked about how pain contains its own energy, and how the experience of pain shows up across spiritual traditions, from pilgrimage to ritual ordeal. Reading his book was actually the first time I connected the dots on my own history. During the darkest period of my life, back when I was tattooing, I got a lot of tattoos to process what I was going through. I never consciously thought of it as witchcraft until I read Jake's book and realized I had been channeling pain into healing the entire time, using the tattoo itself as the symbol of the thing I was moving through.

Turning Your Body Into Sacred Space

Jake shared a few specific techniques from the book that I hadn't considered before. One is creating a "spell space" tattoo, essentially an outline of an altar on your own skin that you can color in with markers whenever you want to work a spell, wherever you happen to be. He has one on his thigh that he's used for healing work while traveling. Another is a sigil wheel tattoo using the Theban alphabet, a magickal script, arranged in a circle on his ribs. He turns an affirmation into a single word, then traces the letters with a marker as a meditative practice, effectively creating a reusable sigil built into his own body.

Tattoos, Lucid Dreaming, and Glamour Magick

Jake gave a shoutout to fellow author Nikki Wardwell Sleath, who wrote Dream Sorcery, for an idea he wishes he'd thought of himself. She has tattoos she uses specifically as reality checks for lucid dreaming, since our brains can't hold fine visual detail in dreams the way they can when we're awake. We also talked about how tattoos can become tools in glamour magick. One of my own Coven members mentioned using tattoos this way just weeks before Jake's book came out, framing a tattoo's symbolism as part of how he wanted to be perceived and desired in the world. Jake and I ended up going down a whole tangent about the connection between glamour magick and sex magick, and how both trace back to the underlying current of desire.

Jake's Story of Coming Into Witchcraft

We closed out the conversation with Jake's own path into the Craft, which started at twelve years old when he stumbled on an old Angelfire website about Wicca and felt an instant sense of recognition. Both of his parents pushed back hard, and he ended up practicing in secret for years, including improvising his first athame out of a steak knife from his mother's kitchen set. Years later, when he told his father he was being published by Llewellyn, his father, a hardcore Christian, revealed he'd actually been a new age reader back in the seventies. It's a reminder that the people in our lives sometimes carry more connection to this path than we ever realize.

If any of this makes you look at your own tattoos differently, Jake's book Tattoo Magick is out now from Llewellyn, and you can find him on Instagram at @that_morningstar_witch.

Want to hear the entire conversation, including the part I'm still laughing about? Listen to the full episode of Busy, Gritty, Inked & Witchy. New episodes drop every Wednesday.