Cornflower tattoo meaning is refinement, harmony, purity, tenderness, love, and fidelity. The cornflower tattoo designs will suit true optimistically constant people, both women, and men.
The blue color of a cornflower was selected by poets as a symbol of fidelity and constancy. However the flower can change its color, from red to white and consequently cornflower tattoos also can mean inconstancy: the one whose heart is changeable, who does not know, on what to stop, that one makes a cornflower tattoo.
The traditional color for the cornflower tattoo is blue, but rather often people choose black and white colors or red colors. Among all the people of Europe, the cornflower is very popular among Germans.
The cornflower is known since ancient times. The first mention about it was found at Pliny the Senior and is dated by the middle of the 1-century a.c. and The Patrimonial name of cornflower (Сentaurea) comes from the Greek word «Kentaurion» and is given in honor of Heron a well-known mythological centaur who knew about the curative properties of grasses, including cornflower.
Legends about cornflower
According to one legend, Сentaur cured his wound of the poisoned arrow of Heracles with the cornflower juice.
Cornflower has a Latin specific name – Cyanus which in Ancient Greece was connected with the name of nymph Kiane – daughter of the god of the rivers Meander, who turned into a stream with dark blue water which became an inflow of the river Anapis flowing not far from Syracuse.
But one of the Roman legends says that the flower got this name by the name of handsome young man Cyanus who was so keen by the beauty of dark blue wildflowers that wore only dark blue clothes, never left the fields while cornflowers grew there, and endlessly spun wreaths and garlands from them.
After some time he was found dead on a grain field among his favorite flowers. The goddess Flora which the young man loved more than others, for his constancy and love to her, as a sign of special gesture transformed the body of the young man into his favorite flower, which since that time has the name Cyanus.
Cornflower and the blue Sky
Once the Sky reproached the grain field in ingratitude.
– Everything that lives on Earth, thanks me, – it has told, – flowers send me their fragrance, woods – their mysterious whisper, birds – singing. Only grain stalks do not express my gratitude. And after all, I fill your roots with freshening rain and I force your grains to grow.
– On the contrary, we are grateful, – stalks have objected, – we decorate Earth by the eternally worrying and shaking sea of greens, but we do not have the possibility to rise up to you. Help us and we will shower you with caresses and will speak about love.
– Well, – the Sky has answered, – if you cannot rise up to me I will come to you.
And it has ordered to Earth to grow up among stalks wonderful dark blue flowers like particles of the Sky. And since then stalks of grain cereals at each whiff of breeze bow to the messengers of the dark blue sky and whisper them tender words of love.
Cornflower tattoo designs and ideas
