What’s a Cybersigilism Tattoo and Why Are You Seeing Them Everywhere?

It’s a style that’s hard to pin down but impossible to miss. And it’s seemingly everywhere—splashed across Gen Z’s dystopian-fashion TikTok rabbit holes, stamped all over Playboi Carti’s vamped-out camp, carved into Grimes’s alien-scarred torso, and blazing across Billie Eilish’s infernally inked back.

“A lot of people describe it as looking almost like a witch’s curse,” says Aingelblood, who claims some credit with coining the term cybersigilism. “I would define it as any sort of magical-looking tattoo that people get to make themselves like their body a little bit more.”

Some see it as a grasp for meaning in a hyper-digital, end-times-coded world. Others are just here for the vibes. But not everyone in the tattoo community is enchanted by it. Naysayers mock it as Gen Z’s version of the tribal tat—a misguided trend doomed to curdle like a millennial’s old drunken Facebook statuses—and argue it veers into cultural insensitivity, lifting sacred iconography for clout, much like its predecessor.

“The cybersigilism boom will be remembered alongside the barbed-wire armbands of the ’90s and the finger mustaches of 2010,” says Australian tattoo artist Thomas Roder.

His Sydney-based shop, Markd, is one several pumping out TikToks where artists take turns roasting the style. “You shouldn’t get a tattoo because someone else has the same thing or it’s the trendy tattoo of the moment,” says Roder. “It should be something you like, something that resonates with you personally.”

For Aingelblood, though, it couldn’t get more personal. They first began experimenting with free-flowing, cybernetic reinterpretations of sigils—ancient symbols considered to be encoded with magic—as they started their gender transition. At the time, defying tattooing’s old guard felt as urgent as reshaping their own identity.

“It was a way to just be like, fuck the system, fuck all these forced sides of femininity, all the misogyny I’d experienced in tattooing,” says Aingelbood, who now works out of LA shop Spearmaiden.

“There’s so much toxic masculinity in this industry. A lot of femme, queer, POC people love cybersigilism, and it’s very easy for some white-dude traditional tattooer to go, ‘Oh, fuck that girly bullshit.’ Of course they’re gonna hate on it.”

Soon, their signature motif of hearts sprouting jagged, clawed vines—a soft-yet-savage look inspired by early-2000s PlayStation classic Kingdom Hearts—began attracting other trans people, musicians, and fashion designers seeking a reset.