Small tattoo of four playing card suits on the inner wrist, a black spade and black club beside a red diamond and red heart outline.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four playing card suits on a wrist

Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows four playing card suits arranged in a loose square: a solid black spade at upper left, a red diamond at upper right, a red outlined heart at lower left and a solid black club at lower right. The linework is clean and bold with simple flat fills, and the black and red ink are both clearly visible. The photograph is taken straight on against a plain light background, with the design centred on the wrist.

Other Spade Diamond Heart Club

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, the lot of you, and mind the lamp. You want to know why those four sat together on the wall of the Gull and Anchor for forty winters? I'll tell you, and you'll not interrupt me, for I was not there myself, and neither was your grandfather, whatever he says.

Keep reading

Saltmere was a town of nets and nerve, and the men of it played cards in the back room of the Gull with the shutters nailed against the wind. Four of them played most nights: Jack Pellow, who dealt from the bottom of the pack; Hester Bline, who never once looked at her hand; Silas Rook, who wore black gloves to hide his tar; and young Nell Carrow, who kept her coins in a red stocking. Rook took the spades, black as the pitch on his boat. Pellow had the clubs, knotted like his oak cudgel. Hester kept the hearts, and Nell the diamonds, though nobody ever argued the colours.

Then came the February the Ellen Marr went down off the Teeth with eleven men aboard, and the room stayed quiet for a month. Nobody had the stomach for the game until Nell laid one card on the table, the ace of diamonds, which she had found sewn into the lining of a drowned man's coat. She said, "Whoever wins this hand brings the boys home." Hester laughed until she coughed, then dealt.

They played till dawn. When the sun came up over the harbour wall, all four were standing, the cards lay face up in a square, and not one of them could remember who had won. Which is why you'll find those four suits painted on the slipway beam, and why no man in Saltmere sits down to cards without first asking the sea for a fair deal.