How neo-medievalist tattoos became a ruling aesthetic

Medieval LARPing is levelling up, with the Middle Ages becoming the go-to playbook for tattoo designs. Think weathered brick castles, crumbling torrents and battle-scarred dragons. As a pushback against hyper-online cultures, tattoos are shifting towards a medieval aesthetic, reimagining iconography and lettering for a new age. This reworking of medieval imagery is what scholars call neomedievalism: a remix of the era’s aesthetics shaped by postmodern fantasy and cultural nostalgia. It’s an aesthetic cropping up across cultures – in music, with medieval samplers and dark-age rave scenes; in fashion, with a fleet of Joan of Arc looks and chainmail-inspired fantasy garb; and in beauty with medieval hair and ‘castlecore’ nails.

Internet folklorist Gunseli Yalcinkaya has long documented the rise of medieval aesthetics across various underground scenes, from bardcore music to neo-pagan peasant fashion and beyond. According to her, “Medieval aesthetics have been creeping into the mainstream for a number of years now... once they’ve entered the social media circuit, they resurface repeatedly as they permeate new online communities.” Yalcinkaya emphasises that this trend typically begins in niche, underground spaces – among ravers, the hyper-online, and alternative art scenes – before eventually gaining mainstream traction through celebrity endorsements (Chappell Roan) and high fashion runways.

Tattooing is one of the creative spaces where neo-medieval aesthetics have steadily circulated. Like any art form, it reflects socio-political ideologies – whether conscious or not. For many artists, the return to medieval motifs pushes back against our hyper-digital lives, much like the Western tattoo revival. In a terminally online culture of cyber-tribal mashups, post-ironic meme ink, and logo tattoos – often critiqued for their ephemerality – medieval designs offer a heavier, more enduring counterpoint.

Melbourne-based artist and Sanguin Studio founder Chi Montmorency agrees: “With the rise of cybersigilism and sharper, more aggressive designs in the underground scene, I’ve found myself moving in the opposite direction – toward something more enduring.” Chi values the craftsmanship of medieval aesthetics, citing a love for the patinas, textures and slow detail that define the look. Their designs include mounted horsemen, medieval headwear and a selection of amulets, claws and ornaments, which they describe as soft armour. “When I started tattooing, this kind of imagery was seeing a surge in popularity,” they tell Dazed. “It means I’ve had consistent interest from returning and new clients over the past few years – and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down.”

Another artist pulling from the medieval is Jean-Baptiste, a Paris-based tattoo artist whose designs often feature dancing jesters, jeering peasants, mythic beasts and – most distinctively – intricately scrawled calligraphy. He draws inspiration from 13th-century manuscripts, gothic illustrations, and even TikTok calligraphy videos. For him, the allure lies in the craftsmanship: “When you read a text knowing someone carefully wrote every single little letter, but on top of that took care to add as many colourful, goofy illustrations as possible, it just hits different.” It’s an intention he works to replicate in his own designs, which are mostly drawn with a nib and ink on paper.

Alongside iconography, lettering has been central to the medieval revival. Gothic scripts – once used in monastic scriptoriums to copy religious texts – have taken on many new lives, cycling through punk flyers, heavy metal merch, and more recently, fashion subculture scenes. Today’s versions trade scripture for Lana Del Rey lyrics or words like “desire”, “lust”, and “lover”, rendered in the same ornate medieval forms.

Part of the charm of medieval aesthetics lies in their fantastical allure. Jean-Baptiste’s designs, often featuring manticores and winged, dragon-like creatures, draw on the gothic obsessions of Théophile Gautier and the dark romanticism of E.T.A. Hoffmann. The Middle Ages is a deeply romanticised era, often framed by tales of heroic knights, tavern revelry, bewildering beasts and the ability to dance around the village playing the lute. It represents an escapism that is worlds apart from modern life. As Umberto Eco writes in Travels in Hyperreality, we often turn to idealised or fabricated versions of the past not to understand history, but to consume “a full-scale replica of the Middle Ages.” In this view, the fantasy of medieval tattooing is a hyperreal gesture, looking back at a stylised past to satisfy contemporary emotional needs.

Yalcinkaya further situates this trend within contemporary sociopolitical realities, explaining that “the popularity of medieval aesthetics can be seen in light of the rise of tech-feudalism in Western society, where the world’s biggest tech companies act as feudal overlords controlling vast amounts of data and user activity.” Essentially, “we are the techno-serfs under the rule of algorithms.” This digital serfdom, Yalcinkaya suggests, helps explain why medieval symbolism is idealised as a form of escape. It’s no wonder we long to spawn into a fantasy realm – and a tattoo is just the entry point.