Black and grey tattoo of a fanned hand of playing cards, with the ace, king, queen and jack of spades, on a section of upper body skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fanned playing cards with a large spade

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A fanned hand of playing cards sits behind a large central spade, showing the ace, king, queen and jack of spades with their corner indices. The linework is bold and dark with soft grey shading on the spade and card edges, and the card backs fade into lighter grey behind the front cards. The design is in black and grey only and fills the frame, with the skin around it lightly lit.

Other Playing card King Queen Spade

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Maddox Travelling Circus lost its elephant in the August, and by the autumn Dad had only the cards left to sell. I was nine when he taught me to fan a hand the way he did, four spades splayed like a peacock's tail, so the crowd saw the ace, the king, the queen and the jack and never the thumb that slid the rest of the deck away. He said a good hand was a kind of lie that agreed to be looked at.

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The big top had patches on its patches by then. The lamps guttered, and the drummer's skin had split from the damp. Mr Ashdown, who owned the lot and most of the debts, wanted the card act to close the second half. Dad said the crowd in Harrowby would pay for a miracle, and the bills said so too, though none of us had seen a miracle since Whitsun.

In Harrowby the crowd did come. They came to see the spades and the big painted spade on the drum, and afterwards a farmer with a red neck and a purse full of shillings sat across from Dad at the trestle table and asked for a game. Dad played the cards he was dealt, not the ones he'd have liked. He lost the last of the tent money on one hand. Then he laid his ace face up on the wood, and the farmer leaned in to see it, and it was only a card.

I took the real ace off the table when nobody was looking and slid it into the lining of my coat. Dad never asked where it went. We packed the drum that night and left the spade painted on the canvas for the next town to find.