Colour photo of a forearm with four small playing card suit tattoos in a diagonal line: a black spade, a red diamond, a black club and a red heart.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four playing card suits on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The image shows a forearm with four playing card suit symbols arranged in a diagonal line from the elbow towards the wrist. A black spade and a black club are solid filled, while a red diamond and a red heart are also solid, with crisp edges and little visible shading. The plain grey background and pink sleeve keep the focus on the tattoos.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ansel, the cargo hold on Meridian smells of rust and tallow tonight, and I have been thinking about your father's deck. The last four cards he kept were the ones printed with the old suits, spade, diamond, club and heart, set in a row like stepping stones across the dark. He used to lay them out on the mess table between shifts and tell the crew they were a map if you read them in the right order.

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The order was never the point, though. The spade came first because it was the hardest to lose, the diamond because it could be traded, the club because you could knock someone flat with it when the arguments turned, and the heart last, because nobody ever bet against it and lived to regret it. He said that in the year the ship's clock broke, the crew played for water rations, and he won every hand with a heart nobody had seen him play.

Last week the purser asked me to sell the tin to the salvage guild in Hollow Reach. I told her no. She says the paper is worth more than the water it could buy, and perhaps she is right. But when I opened the tin I found a note tucked under the heart, in his cramped capitals: WHEN THEY ASK WHAT THE SUITS ARE FOR, SAY THEY ARE HOW WE KEPT COUNT.

So I am keeping count. Eleven of us are left on the lower deck, and I have dealt each of them a spade, a diamond, a club and a heart every night since the lights failed. Come home when your shift ends. Bring the tin, and we will see who is still holding a heart.

Love, Nan Ivy

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