Four small black playing card suit tattoos, a spade, heart, club and diamond, on the wrists of clasped hands, with a metal bangle and a woven bracelet nearby.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four playing card suit tattoos on wrists

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Several hands are clasped together over a wooden surface, showing four small tattoos of a spade, a heart, a club and a diamond on the wrists. The spade, heart and club are solid filled shapes, while the diamond is a simple outline, all in clean, minimal linework against pale skin. The tattoos are entirely black ink, and a metal bangle and a woven red, green and black bracelet sit beside them.

Hand Spade Heart Club Diamond Playing card

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gideon dealt the last hand on the ferry terminal bench because the café had pulled its shutters down an hour before. The wind came off the harbour in cold shoves, and the four of them huddled over an upturned crate, the deck gone soft as cloth from a summer of pockets. Nobody had ever written the rules down. The loser had to say aloud the name of whichever boat they were waiting for, and the winner kept the stub of the last ticket bought.

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Mags spread her fingers wide when she held her cards, as if the spade and the heart she'd been dealt might lift off and blow into the harbour. Tomas never looked at his hand at all. Ines knocked her knuckle twice on the crate before every play, a habit her mother had taught her, and Gideon watched them all with the flat patience of a man who had kept the same deck since he was nineteen. Nobody noticed the diamond was missing until the final trick, when Ines laid down a card that was only an outline, drawn in biro on the back of a receipt.

Nobody asked her where it had come from. Ines had drawn it herself the week her sister left on the Thursday boat, and she had never once put it into a hand. Gideon offered to play it or keep it, and she said the outline was for whoever was still standing on the quay when the boat went out.

Tomas said the name of the boat. Mags said nothing. The gulls went quiet over the water, and the last card lay face down between them, a space the shape of a diamond with nothing in it yet.