December birth flower tattoo: the holly

What the holly means

Protection, and hope through the dark half. Birth flowers come out of Victorian floriography, the habit of pairing each month with a plant and a sentiment, so a December birth flower tattoo carries the month and its meaning in one image.

Where it sits on the body

This drawing is 1.17 times as tall as it is wide: close to square. Shapes like that tend to sit well on the shoulder, the upper arm, the thigh, the hip or the back of the shoulder. Your artist will size and angle it to you.

How much detail it holds

Of our twelve month drawings, the holly ranks 7th for line work, counting from the busiest. That puts it in the middle of the set. It works at a moderate size; ask your artist how small they would take it.

What to take to your tattoo artist

The December pack has this holly as a vector SVG, which scales to any size without blurring, and as a 3000 by 3000 pixel PNG with a clear background. Either one goes straight into an artist’s drawing software. Most artists redraw or adjust a design into their own stencil, so bring it as the reference, not as a finished stencil. Our licence covers taking the line art to a tattoo artist for your own tattoo.

Several birth months in one tattoo

Family tattoos often put several people’s birth flowers together. All twelve of our drawings are made in one style, so any of them sit together in one piece. The whole year, all twelve months, is $19.