Four small tattoos in a vertical line on the lower back, showing a red diamond, a black spade, a red heart and a black club, each with ornamental swirl detail.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four playing card suit motifs on lower back

Back · Mixed · Photo

Four small motifs sit in a vertical column on the lower back, each shaped like a playing card suit: a red diamond, a black spade, a red heart and a black club. Each suit contains fine ornamental swirl and scrollwork linework. The red and black ink is set against pale skin, with the design occupying a narrow central strip of the photograph.

Back Playing card Diamond Spade Heart Club Swirl Ornament Suit

Find an artist for this

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 big top had been patched so often that its canvas looked like a map of somewhere else, and Nell Garrow counted the holes each morning before the rain could find them. Halloran & Sons Travelling Show had three wagons left, one elephant that refused to leave the field, and a ringmaster who kept the takings in a biscuit tin under his bunk. Nell kept the deck of cards. The backs were foxed brown at the corners, and every suit carried the same curling ornament inked into its pips, a little iron scroll her grandfather had called a Dutch maker's mark.

Keep reading

Each Saturday she dealt four cards face up on the caravan step for the children who waited outside the ticket booth. Diamond for the road, spade for the spare pennies, heart for whoever would come back, club for the hands that carried the poles. The children paid a halfpenny to hear it. Tom Halloran, the ringmaster's nephew, paid in buttons and asked for the club every time, because he wanted to know if he would still be lifting canvas when he was forty.

In October the council refused the field renewal, and the show came down in one wet afternoon. Nell found the last card wedged under a wagon seat: a club, its scrollwork bent where someone had folded it in a hurry. She had dealt that card a hundred times and never once looked at its corner. Tom came splashing across the mud with the biscuit tin under his arm, grinning, the takings already split four ways in his fist.

She pressed the club into his palm and told him to keep it, that the poles would be somebody else's problem by spring. Then she slid the deck into her coat, and they walked the wagons down the lane toward the station without looking back. Behind them the men were folding the tent like a sail into the back of a lorry, and the elephant stood alone in the empty field, watching them go.