July birth flower tattoo: the water lily

What the water lily means

Purity, and an open heart. Birth flowers come out of Victorian floriography, the habit of pairing each month with a plant and a sentiment, so a July birth flower tattoo carries the month and its meaning in one image.

Where it sits on the body

This drawing is 1.05 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 water lily has the most line work. That is a lot of line work for its size. Give it room: the closer fine lines sit, the more they can blur together as a tattoo ages, so this one suits a larger piece better than a tiny one.

What to take to your tattoo artist

The July pack has this water lily 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.