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# Your Body, His Name, and That Verse in Leviticus
A young woman in our church showed me her forearm last Sunday — a verse from Isaiah, inked in elegant script, wrapping her wrist. She wanted to know if I thought she'd sinned. Behind her, I could see a deacon with a full sleeve of pre-conversion artwork he's never once considered removing. I told her I needed to think carefully before I answered, which is pastor-speak for "I have a sermon to write."
I've had this conversation, or some version of it, perhaps thirty times in the last decade. The questioner is almost always sincere, almost always anxious, and almost always operating with the same half-remembered verse from Leviticus that someone — a youth leader, a grandmother, an internet stranger — once quoted at them. The conversation usually lasts longer than they expected, because the honest answer is neither "yes, you sinned" nor "no, don't worry about it." The honest answer is that the question they're asking is a much better question than they realise, and the verse they're worried about is doing rather different work than they think.
## The Verse Everyone Googles
Here is the verse, in its bare form: "You shall not make any cuts on your body for the dead or tattoo yourselves: I am the LORD" (Leviticus 19:28). On a first reading, in English, in 2024, it appears to settle the matter. God said no. Case closed. Throw out the needle.
But notice what happens when you read the whole sentence. The prohibition on tattooing sits inside a single thought: cuts on the body for the dead, and tattoos. These are not two separate concerns awkwardly stapled together; they are aspects of one practice — the use of bodily marking in connection with mourning rituals practiced by Israel's pagan neighbours. The ancient Near Eastern context is reasonably well attested. When someone died, people gashed themselves, marked themselves, sometimes inked themselves, as part of religious rites that connected the living to the dead and to the deities thought to rule over them. The marking was cultic. It said something about who you belonged to and which spiritual world you inhabited.
This matters, because it means the verse is not a context-free aesthetic ruling on body art. It is part of Israel's distinctive call to be unlike the surrounding nations in their handling of death and the dead. Proof-texting it as a stand-alone prohibition is the kind of move that, if we made it with any other verse in this chapter, we'd be embarrassed by within thirty seconds. Which brings us to the awkward neighbours.
## Why the Whole Chapter Has to Come With You
Leviticus 19 is a remarkable chapter. It begins with the foundational call, "You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy," and proceeds to spell out what that holiness looks like across an extraordinary range of life. It contains the second great commandment — "you shall love your neighbour as yourself" — which Jesus himself lifts up as the summary of the law alongside love of God. It commands fair wages, honest weights, care for the deaf and the blind. It forbids slander, partiality in court, and the harvesting of the corners of your field so that the poor and the sojourner can glean.
It also forbids wearing clothing made of two kinds of material (verse 19), trimming the edges of your beard (verse 27), and breeding two kinds of cattle together (also verse 19). My friends who quote verse 28 at their teenagers tend to be wearing cotton-polyester blends and to have shaved that morning.
The point is not gotcha. The point is that the chapter presents a unified vision of a people set apart, and the moment we start picking verses out as universally binding while ignoring their neighbours, we've stopped doing theology and started doing tribalism. Either the chapter has a single hermeneutical key that the New Testament gives us, or we're free to pick and choose — in which case let's at least admit we're picking and choosing.
There is a single hermeneutical key. The New Testament gives it to us. But it takes some patience.
## What the New Testament Does to the Law
Jesus is uncompromising: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them" (Matthew 5:17). Paul is equally uncompromising in the opposite direction: "Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes" (Romans 10:4). Both are true. The law is fulfilled in Christ, which means its purposes are accomplished in him and its categories are reframed around him.
Practically, the early church had to work this out in real time. The Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 dealt with the question of whether Gentile converts had to take on the full apparatus of Jewish law — circumcision, food laws, the lot. The ruling was that they did not. They were asked to abstain from a short list of practices that would have been particularly offensive to Jewish believers and tied to pagan worship, but the ceremonial apparatus of holiness — the cuttings, the markings, the diet, the textiles — was not transferred wholesale onto the new covenant community.
This is not Marcionite. The moral weight of the Old Testament law is not jettisoned; it is intensified in Jesus's teaching and Paul's. But the specific apparatus by which Israel marked itself off from its neighbours — including, I would argue, the prohibition on cultic body modification — is reframed. The body is no longer a site where holiness is performed through ritual marking or non-marking. It has become something different in Christ, and that something different is, in some ways, far more demanding than the original prohibition.
So no, Leviticus 19:28 does not, by itself, settle whether a Christian can get a tattoo. But this is the moment where many sermons go wrong, because the move from "Leviticus 19:28 doesn't bind us in the way you thought" to "therefore tattoos are fine, do what you want" is a much bigger leap than it appears. It skips over the actual New Testament theology of the body, which has rather more to say than people expect.
## But the Body Still Means Something
Paul writes to the Corinthians, who had inherited a strand of Greek philosophy that treated the body as essentially incidental to the real person, a sort of meat costume that the soul wore for a while and would eventually shed. This view produced two opposite ethical strategies: severe asceticism (punish the meat) and casual libertinism (who cares what the meat does). Paul rejects both with one of the most important sentences in the New Testament for any discussion of bodies:
"Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body" (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).
You are not your own. This is the sentence that complicates every contemporary conversation about bodily autonomy, including, eventually, tattoos. The Christian body is not a blank canvas owned by the self and available for self-expression on whatever terms the self chooses. It is purchased, indwelt, and consecrated. It belongs to another.
Romans 12 doubles down: "I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship." The body is the site of worship. It is the offering. Whatever you do with it is theological.
This does not produce a rule about tattoos. It produces something more searching: a set of questions about what you are saying with your body, and to whom you are saying it, and on whose authority you are saying it.
## Identity Written in Skin
Now consider the cultural moment. Tattoos have shifted, in my lifetime, from a marker of subcultural belonging, sailors, bikers, prisoners, the occasional aristocrat with a tiger on her shoulder, to one of the most mainstream forms of self-expression in the West. The shift is staggering in scale. In the UK, around a third of adults under forty have at least one tattoo, and the numbers are similar across most Western countries. The market has grown enormously.
What is interesting is not the numbers but the meanings. Ask people why they got their tattoos and you will almost never hear "I thought it looked cool" as the primary reason, though sometimes that's lurking. You will hear stories: a child's name, a date a parent died, a verse that pulled them through a depression, a symbol of recovery from addiction, a tribute to a place, a person, a moment, a declaration of who they are or who they have decided to become.
In a secular age, to borrow Charles Taylor's phrase, since we're already in the neighbourhood, people are writing their stories on their bodies because the older institutions that used to write stories on us have receded. The church no longer baptises most of us. The state no longer conscripts most of us. The trade no longer brands most of us with its guild. Family, region, class, all the markers that used to tell you who you were have weakened. And so people have started doing the marking themselves.
This is, theologically, a significant phenomenon. It is not trivial vanity. It is, often, a kind of liturgy. People are performing, in ink, the question every human being has to answer: whose am I, and what story am I in?
Which means a sneering, dismissive Christian response to tattoo culture, "kids these days, defacing the temple", misses the spiritual register entirely. Something is happening on those forearms. People are reaching for meaning and trying to make it permanent. The question for the church is not whether to permit or prohibit. The question is whether we have anything to say to people whose deepest instinct is that their identity ought to be readable on their skin.
We do. We've always had something to say about this. We just don't say it often enough.
## What God Has Already Written There
"Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me" (Isaiah 49:16). This is God speaking to Zion, to his exiled people, in a moment of profound covenantal love. The image is deliberately bodily and deliberately permanent. The Lord of hosts has marked himself with the name of his people. He carries them inked on his hands.
The same image, in reverse, appears at the climax of Revelation. The rider on the white horse, the one called Faithful and True, comes to make all things right. "On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords" (Revelation 19:16). Christ himself bears a marked body. The wounds of the crucifixion are still on the resurrected Lord, Thomas is invited to touch them, and the name of his sovereignty is written on him in the final vision of his coming.
This is striking. The God of Leviticus 19, the same God, is depicted across the canon as bearing names on his body. The marks of his people are on his hands. The name of his Lordship is on his thigh. The wounds of his love are on his hands and side. The body of Christ, the actual body of the actual incarnate Son, is a body with names and marks on it that mean something eternal.
Which means the deepest Christian claim about your body is not that it is unmarked. It is that it has already been marked, by a prior love, with a prior name, before you ever picked up a needle or a Sharpie. You were baptised in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, a marking that does not appear on the skin but is no less real for that. You were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise (Ephesians 1:13). You were inscribed on the palms of God's own hands before you knew your own name.
When the young woman with the Isaiah verse on her wrist asked me whether she had sinned, what she was really asking, I think, was whether her instinct to write her belonging onto her body was wrong. My answer, eventually, was that her instinct was profoundly right. The question was whether what she had written was true.
## What I Actually Tell People
After all of that, here is what I find myself saying in the pastoral conversation. It is not a list of rules but a set of diagnostic questions, which I offer in roughly this order.
First, what are you declaring? Every tattoo is, in some sense, a creed. It announces something, a name, an allegiance, a story, a love. Before you make it permanent on your skin, can you say out loud what you are declaring, and would you be willing to declare it from a pulpit? If the answer is yes, you've already done more theological work than most people who get inked. If the answer is no, if you can't articulate what you're saying, then perhaps the question is not whether to get the tattoo but whether you've spent enough time with the meaning you're about to wear.
Second, whose are you? This is the harder version of the first question. A tattoo of a partner's name when you're nineteen is a different proposition from a tattoo of your child's name when you're thirty-five, and both are different from a tattoo of a verse that has carried you through grief. The question is not romance or sentimentality. The question is whether the thing you are marking yourself with reflects an identity rooted in something that will hold. Christ holds. Most other things, eventually, do not.
Third, what about the witness? Paul's instinct in 1 Corinthians is always to ask how a freedom plays in the wider community, whether it builds up or merely asserts. A Christian with a tattoo of a beloved scripture has, in many contexts, an opening for conversation that a Christian without one does not. A Christian with a tattoo of something they're now embarrassed by has a different kind of witness, sometimes, surprisingly, a more powerful one, because it tells the story of having been changed. There is no clean rule here, only the question of whether your body is, in some way, in service of the gospel rather than merely in service of yourself.
Fourth, what is your relationship to permanence? We live in a culture that promises endless self-revision, new identities, new bodies, new genders, new beginnings, all available on demand. A tattoo cuts against this in an interesting way. It asks you to commit, to say: this much of me is settled. Christians, of all people, should be comfortable with permanence, because we serve a God who has covenantally bound himself to us forever. But we should also be cautious about claiming permanence for things that are not, in fact, permanent. The faces and names we love can change. The verses we love, generally, do not.
Fifth, and this is where I land with most people, is your body still, in your own mind, his? Not yours. His. Bought with a price. A living sacrifice. A temple. If you can get a tattoo while still believing that your body is fundamentally not your own, and you can show me how the tattoo expresses that belonging rather than contradicting it, then I am not going to quote Leviticus 19:28 at you. I am going to thank God that someone in this generation is doing the hard work of figuring out what it means to be embodied before God.
And if you cannot, if the tattoo is, deep down, a small act of declaring autonomy, of asserting that this is mine and mine alone, of writing your own story over the one God has already written, then no verse in Leviticus is going to fix that, and getting or not getting the tattoo is the least of your concerns.
The deacon with the full sleeve and the young woman with the Isaiah verse, as it turns out, were having different conversations with God about their bodies. Both of them were taking the conversation seriously. That, more than the ink itself, is what I want for the people I pastor.
"So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God" (1 Corinthians 10:31).