Four-panel photo of a traditional colour tattoo on a forearm, showing a heart, roses, a devil, a skull and a mermaid framed as Mexican loteria cards.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Loteria cards and roses on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows several loteria-style cards labelled El Corazon, El Diablito, La Calavera, La Rosa and La Sirena, with a red anatomical heart, a skull and crossbones, a devil, a mermaid and large pink roses with green leaves. The bold black outlines are filled with solid, saturated colour, with some soft shading on the roses and card edges. The four panels show the same forearm from different angles, with the cards arranged in overlapping layers around the roses.

Traditional Forearm Heart Rose Devil Skull Crossbones Mermaid Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit, sit, and keep your hands on the table where I can see them. This is the Lunes game, the one the fleet plays when the boats come in short-handed and the wind won't let them out. Old Ruiz kept the board at the back of the Sirena, with a tin of dried beans for counters and a deck gone soft as cloth from forty years of thumbs.

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The night it went wrong, Ruiz was calling for the widow Carrasco, who had lost her husband to a squall off the Point and had sworn she would win back the cost of his funeral. El Diablito came up first, the little red devil with his tail curled like a question mark. Then El Corazon, the heart, and the whole room went quiet, because everybody knew what that heart meant in a fleet town. Then La Calavera, grinning from the card as if he had been waiting all evening for his turn.

She did not shout. She laid her beans down slowly and looked past Ruiz to the window, where the bay was black and the trawler lamps swung on their chains. "La Rosa," she said quietly. "And La Sirena, who sings the boats home." The beans were counted, the card was checked, and the room held its breath while the sea outside decided what it owed.

Ruiz swore afterwards that the mermaid on the card had turned her head. The widow took the pot, bought a round for every man in the place, and never sat down at the board again. Some games are only ever for the one who calls the last card.