Side of a torso showing four stacked playing card suit tattoos on the ribs, with a red diamond, black spade, red heart and black club in a brushed watercolour style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four card suits down the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

Four playing card suits are stacked vertically along the side of the ribs: a red diamond, a black spade, a red heart and a black club. The suits have soft, painted edges with visible brush strokes and slight bleeding, giving a loose watercolour effect rather than crisp outlines. Red and black ink are balanced across the column against a plain skin background, with a pair of jeans and a brown belt visible at the bottom of the frame.

Ribs Playing card Diamond Spade Heart Club

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the draught from the door, the landlord of the Crown has never once paid to have it stopped. Now. It was the winter of 1953, the week after the coronation bunting came down off the high street, and Ada Pruett walked into the back room with four cards tucked inside her cardigan. Nobody saw her take them out. Everybody saw her sit.

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Harold Crane was the miller then, a big soft-spoken man who owned the mill at the bottom of Hob Lane and most of the debts that went with it. He put the deeds on the baize like a man laying down a Sunday roast. Ada didn't look at them. She laid out her first card, a diamond the colour of a brick kiln at dusk, its edges smudged where her thumb had pressed too long. Then a spade, black as the soot on the chapel roof, and a heart that bled a little down the felt, as if it had been cut that morning. Last, a club, soft as moss after rain.

Harold asked for the turn. She said the cards don't lie, only the men who hold them, and then she turned the club over, and the old clock behind the bar stopped dead, the way it always did when something was settled. Harold had been counting the wrong suits all night. The deeds were in her cardigan pocket, signed over to the parish for a new village hall, and the mill was nobody's now but the river's.

That's the whole of it. Harold walked home without his hat, and the four cards went into the church poor box, where I expect they're still waiting for someone to ask about them. Pass me that jug, would you, my throat's gone dry.