Black and white photo of four wrists held together, each with a small solid black playing card suit tattoo: a spade, a heart, a club and a diamond, on the forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four playing card suit tattoos on wrists

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Four wrists are held together in a black and white photograph, each marked with a small solid black playing card suit: a spade, a heart, a club and a diamond. The shapes are simple, bold and filled in, with clean edges and no visible shading. The composition is close and cropped, with a metal coin bracelet and a woven band visible on two of the wrists.

Forearm Spade Heart Club Diamond Playing card Suit Wrist

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

Snow had sealed the Hollin Cross inn to its eaves by the second night, and the four of them were still at the table when the lamp needed trimming. Mrs Pargeter kept the deck in a biscuit tin with a cracked lid, and she dealt it like a woman who had been cheated before and meant to be ready for it next time.

Keep reading

The four were strangers who had come in off the moor road. There was a carter with a gold coin tied to his wrist for luck, a schoolmaster's widow who counted every card twice, a boy called Tobin who owed money to everyone in the valley, and a quiet girl who played with her wrists pressed together as if she were keeping a secret in them. They started for matchsticks. Then the carter laid down the ace of spades and said he would stake his grey mare on the next hand, and the room went still, because nobody had seen the mare all evening and nobody wanted to ask whose she was.

So they played for something real. Each of them took a burnt cork from the hearth and marked a small shape on the inside of a wrist: a spade for the bad luck they carried, a heart for the one they could not leave behind, a club for the road, a diamond for the thing that stayed hard and clear whatever the weather did. Then they pressed their wrists together over the cards and swore that the loser would walk out to the stable at first light and answer for the mare.

Morning came white and silent. The boy lost, which surprised nobody in the old tellings, and he went out into the drifts with his lantern. The stable was empty. There were only hoofprints leading north under the crust, and beside the door, pressed into the frost, four small marks, one for each of them, as though a hand had touched the snow on its way past and kept walking.