Black and grey dotwork tattoos of The Chariot and Strength tarot cards, one on each calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chariot and Strength tarot tattoos on legs

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

Two tarot card tattoos sit side by side on the lower legs. The left card shows The Chariot, with a figure in a cart pulled by sphinxes, and the right shows Strength, with a woman with a lion. Both are drawn in bold black outlines with stippled dotwork shading in the backgrounds and borders, and the image contains no colour ink.

Dotwork Calf Strength Lion Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still and mind the size, boy, because the ink dries faster than you think. That's the Chariot you're holding, the one with two sphinxes, one dark and one pale, who will never pull together however much you shout at them. My uncle painted that card for a man in Arles who swore the beasts were his wife and his brother. The charioteer has no reins at all. He holds his wand and his little starred canopy and trusts the road.

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Now the other one. Strength is the card people misread. They see a woman and think she must be fighting, but look at her hands. She isn't gripping that lion's jaw, she's resting her fingers on it the way you'd rest them on a sleeping dog. The lion has been there all along, and she has simply stopped pretending she needs to beat it. Over her head the figure eight lies on its side, the sign for something without end.

When the Arles man came back for his pair, he wanted the sphinxes redrawn so they would pull in the same direction. My uncle refused and charged him double for the refusal. Then he carried the cards to the window, held them up to the grey light, and said the lion and the sphinxes had never once been the problem. The man paid, tucked his cards under his coat, and walked off into the rain with his own shoulders set straight.