May birth flower tattoo: the lily of the valley

What the lily of the valley means

Sweetness, and the return of happiness. Birth flowers come out of Victorian floriography, the habit of pairing each month with a plant and a sentiment, so a May birth flower tattoo carries the month and its meaning in one image.

Where it sits on the body

This drawing is 1.48 times as tall as it is wide: upright, clearly taller than it is wide. Shapes like that tend to sit well on the forearm, the outer upper arm, the calf or the shoulder blade. Your artist will size and angle it to you.

How much detail it holds

Of our twelve month drawings, the lily of the valley ranks 11th for line work, counting from the busiest. That makes it one of the lighter drawings in the set, with open space between the lines, which is what lets a design hold up at a smaller size.

What to take to your tattoo artist

The May pack has this lily of the valley 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.