Black and grey engraving-style tattoo of a seated girl beside playing cards inside an ornate scrolled frame, on a woman's upper back.

Alice and playing cards on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A seated girl with a raised arm sits among playing cards, set within an ornate scrolled frame with foliage and leaf-like shapes. The linework is fine and detailed, with dense hatching and stippled shading that gives the piece an engraved, vintage illustration look. The design is entirely dark ink on pale skin, and it fills the centre of the upper back, with the subject's head turned away from the camera.

Back Alice Girl Playing card Scrollwork Foliage Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The parcel came in on the Thursday mail, tied with string and smelling faintly of coal smoke. Edith Pell slit the paper with her hatpin and found a single engraved plate, torn from some old book, its edges soft as cloth. A girl sat in the middle of it, legs tucked beneath her dress, one arm lifted as though she meant to hail a train. Around her, playing cards lay scattered like fallen leaves, and a scrolled frame curled over the whole scene, thick with foliage that might have been hedges or hair.

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There was no label, no name, only a ticket stub folded behind the plate, dated the eleventh of March and punched for the Northern line. Edith had sorted umbrellas and spectacles for nine years at Harrowgate Junction and had learned that people left things they could not carry. She held the print to the gas lamp. The cards were not ordinary. Each one bore a station name where a pip should have been, and the girl's raised hand pointed at the card nearest her, which read Return.

At four o'clock she walked the length of the up platform with the plate in her glove. A man in a grey overcoat stood by the water tower, not waiting for any train. He saw the picture and went very still. His wife had drawn those cards, he said, every winter, to pass the hours while the trains ran late. She had always sworn the girl would win the last hand by counting the stops rather than the spots.

The 4.52 came in with its brakes sighing. The man took the plate, studied the raised arm for a long time, and folded it carefully into his breast pocket. Edith watched the carriage doors bang shut and the lamps slide away towards the tunnel. Back in the office she found the ticket stub had been punched again, fresh, though no one had touched it since the morning.