Four pairs of hands are held out palms up, each inner wrist showing a small solid tattoo of a suit symbol: a red heart, a black club, a red diamond and a black spade.

Four playing card suit tattoos on wrists

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Four people hold their arms out with palms facing up, each showing a small tattoo on the inner wrist. The designs are simple solid icons of playing card suits, with the heart and diamond in red and the club and spade in black. The plain, even fills sit centred on each wrist against a dark red floor, with the four arms arranged side by side.

Forearm Heart Club Diamond Spade

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming off the market roofs since dawn, running in grey ropes from the gutters onto Ruth Pellow's pitch. She was packing the last of the old decks into a biscuit tin when a man in a camel coat stopped beside the trestle and rapped his umbrella on the wood. 'Four pounds for the lot,' he said. Ruth didn't look up. She had learnt to let buyers like him do the wanting.

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Her brother Denny counted the coins with his back to the wind, sorting them by size the way their mother had sorted cards when they were small. Hearts for the kitchen, clubs for the drains, diamonds for the shop window, spades for the graves, she used to say, and laugh until she coughed. The four of them had kept the stall going after she died, and every Saturday the suits came out again in the same order, face up, like a hand nobody had the nerve to play.

The man took the bundle, paid in damp notes, and walked off towards the fish hall without a word. Ruth was halfway through fitting the lid on the tin when Denny said, 'He's left his brolly.' It was hooked over the edge of the trestle, black and heavy, its ribs stiff with rain. Pressed flat against the silk inside the canopy was a single card: the ace of spades, its corners soft as cloth, with their mother's handwriting across the back. Not for sale.

Ruth looked down the wet lane and saw the camel coat turning back, one hand raised. She pulled the card free and slipped it into her pocket. 'Keep the umbrella,' she said, and Denny laughed, and the rain kept falling on the empty pitch.