Your Birth Angel Portrait is printed on museum-grade archival paper with rich, fade-resistant pigment inks, then mounted in a handcrafted wooden frame behind protective glazing. The print measures 16 × 20 inches, and the frame is available in warm wood, matte black or matte white.

Archival stock and pigment inks are rated to hold their colour for over a century, so the portrait looks the same on the day it is passed on as it does the day it arrives.

Every portrait follows the same composition. The angel is illustrated in the manner of the old devotional manuscripts — painted in soft alabaster, dusty blue and gold, on aged parchment with a gilded border and hand-drawn filigree.

Beneath the illustration, a gold ribbon carries the angel’s name. Below it sits the five-day window of the calendar, then two columns of text: what the name has traditionally been taken to mean, and the celestial choir the angel belongs to. The final line is written for one person alone.

The portrait is drawn from a traditional calendar that divides the year into seventy-two windows of about five days, each one carrying the name of an angel. We worked from several independent published versions of that calendar and used only what they agree on.

Where sources contradict each other on a translation or a meaning, we leave it out rather than choose between them. The calendar is fixed and public, which means the same birth date always gives the same angel — you can check it, and it will match.

You don’t need to know anything about birth angels in advance. Enter a first name and a date of birth at checkout, and the calendar does the rest.

The date decides the angel; the name is written into the final line of the portrait, so the piece belongs to one person and to no one else. Ordering for someone else? Enter their name and their date of birth.