Three-panel photo of a black and grey realism tattoo showing a grinning joker face, playing cards, banknotes, poker chips and chess pieces, placed on a lower limb.

Joker, cards, money and chess on a limb

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The triptych shows a black and grey tattoo covering a limb, with a grinning joker face on the right panel and a Joker playing card, ace of spades, rolled banknotes, a portrait on a note, and stacked poker chips on the left and centre panels. The linework is fine and the shading is smooth, giving the banknotes and the joker's face strong tonal depth. Chess pieces and a checkered background sit below the joker, and the three panels are arranged side by side in a close-up composition.

Realism Other Joker Playing card Banknote Clown

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The school hall still smelled of floor polish and warm squash, and Dennis Marr was already working the room as if the last twenty-six years had been an interval. He had the same restless hands. Even at the buffet he was walking a deck from palm to palm, cards flicking over his knuckles the way they had in Mr Hollis's Thursday chess club, where he never once bothered with the board.

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We had been the two clever boys nobody picked for anything. He taught me to play brag for pear drops behind the bike sheds, and I taught him the bishop's diagonal, which he never forgave me for. When he finally got to me he pressed a fat roll of notes into my hand, held together by a rubber band gone brittle with age. 'Your share from Carl's,' he said. I had never been to Carl's, and I told him so. He just laughed and said nobody ever remembered the favours they were owed.

I asked what he did now. He dealt a single card face up on the trestle table, the joker, its painted jester leering at the ceiling tiles. 'Same as always,' he said. 'Read people. Chess is for men who like to lose slowly.' Then he slid a little stack of blue and white chips across the cloth and walked off towards the drinks without waiting to see whether I would take them.

I sat there with the notes warm in my jacket and the joker grinning up from the tablecloth. Somewhere a microphone squealed, a teacher called for silence, and the card's painted face stayed exactly as it was, wide and delighted, as if it had won the whole evening and knew it. I left the chips where they lay and drove home the long way, thinking about the rubber band and how easily it had snapped.