Lily Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a lily tattoo means

The purity reading comes almost entirely from Christian painting. In nearly every Annunciation made after about 1300 the angel Gabriel carries a white lily, and the flower became so firmly attached to the Virgin that its common name is still the Madonna lily. Worn for that reason it is a devotional tattoo that does not look like one.

Across much of Europe the same flower means the opposite end of a life. White lilies are the standard funeral flower, laid on coffins and sent to houses in mourning, which gives the bloom a second and entirely separate meaning: not innocence but loss. Both readings are live at once, and which one a viewer reaches for depends mostly on where they grew up.

Greek myth supplies a third and stranger origin. The lily is said to have sprung from drops of Hera's milk, which makes it a flower about motherhood rather than about chastity — a reading that sits oddly beside the Christian one and is worth knowing if the piece is for a parent.

And there is the plainest reason people choose it, which needs no mythology at all: the lily is a birth flower for May, and a great many are worn as a marker for a month, a person or a date. That is a perfectly good reason, and saying it out loud changes how the flower should be drawn.

Where the design comes from

The Madonna lily, Lilium candidum, is among the oldest ornamental plants in cultivation anywhere. It appears in the frescoes at Knossos on Crete from around 1580 BC and in Egyptian tomb painting earlier still, which makes it older as a decorative subject than most of the symbols now attached to it. The fleur-de-lis, despite carrying the word in its name, is almost certainly a stylised iris rather than a lily. And the flower that dominates modern lily tattoos is not old at all: the speckled pink Stargazer was bred in California in the 1970s, which means the most-drawn lily of the last twenty years is younger than the tattoo machine by a century.

Choosing yours

• The stamens are the identification, not the petals. Six of them, carrying heavy anthers well clear of the throat, are what no other flower has — draw the bloom without them and you have a generic flower that the eye files under rose or lotus.
• Be specific about which lily. A calla is a single furled spathe around a straight spadix and shares almost nothing with a true lily beyond the name; lily of the valley is a row of small hanging bells on an arching stem and is a different plant again. Asking for "a lily" and meaning one of those is the commonest disappointment here.
• Most true lilies hang their heads rather than facing out, and almost nobody draws them that way. A nodding bloom seen from slightly below, with the tepals swept back and the stamens dangling, is both more accurate and more interesting than the flat face-on version.

Common questions