Black and grey realism full arm sleeve on an upper arm and forearm, shown from five angles, featuring a banknote portrait, playing cards, stars and an 8 ball.

Full arm sleeve with banknote portrait and cards

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Five views of a full arm sleeve show a central portrait of a banknote figure surrounded by folded banknotes, stars across the shoulder, and playing cards with an ace of spades. Lower on the arm are a clown face, flames, a dollar sign, script lettering and an 8 ball, with the lettering running down the forearm. The work is shaded in black and grey with fine detail, soft gradients and high contrast, and the collage shows the sleeve from front, side and back.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Banknote Portrait Playing card Star Dollar sign Money Clown Flame Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ace of spades had been sitting on the bar at the Bell Street snooker hall since Thursday, face up, weighted under a pint glass, and nobody would admit to putting it there. Dot Pask swept around it for two days as if it were a dropped tooth. On Saturday night the room filled with the usual sort: men in good coats who never bought a round, and a lad from the printworks who thought a stack of folded fifties could buy him a seat at the big table.

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Lenny Crane had the lad's money in his breast pocket, crisp as a dressed crab. He had run the cards at the back for eleven years and had never once come up short. "Double or nothing on the black," he said, and the lad laughed, because it was an easy shot for a boy who had been practising on the cracked table out back since he was fourteen. The cue ball kissed the black, the black hung, hesitated, then rolled the wrong way along the cushion and dropped into the far corner with a sound like a cough.

Nobody spoke. Dot came over with her mop and looked at the money in the lad's hands, then at Lenny, then at the ace. "That's a dead man's card, Len," she said. "Your dad used to deal from it." Lenny said nothing. He counted the notes out slowly, the way his father had taught him, and laid them on the baize one by one until the pile stood higher than the lad's pride.

Then he pushed it all back across the table. "Buy your mum a coat," he said. Dot lifted the ace off the bar and dropped it in the bin on her way past, and the lights buzzed on over the empty tables.