Two matching colour tattoos of red diamonds and black spade shapes wrapped in green thorned vines, one on a forearm and one on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching playing card and vine tattoos on two arms

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two matching tattoos show red diamond shapes and black spade-like shapes joined by a green vine with thorns and leaves. The designs use bold outlines and solid fills in red, black and green, giving a flat, traditional look. Each tattoo wraps diagonally across the skin, and the two are placed on different arms.

Traditional Forearm Upper arm Playing card Diamond Spade Vine Thorn Leaves

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down and mind that tea, it's stewed like a bishop's conscience. Ward Four's quiet for once, so you've time for the story Dorothy Mallet never finished, because the bell went off on the best bit. Two sisters, Nell and Bet Callow, ran the card table at the back of the Pier Hotel in Morecambe the summer before the war. Nell dealt, Bet cheated, and everybody knew it and nobody minded, because Bet cheated beautifully.

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One wet night a stranger sat in and laid a red diamond on the baize, then a black spade, and said the house owed him a hand. Nell looked down and saw green creeping up from the table's edge, a vine threading through the pips, thorns pushing out where the ink should have stopped. Bet laughed. The stranger said the game would run until one of them lost something they couldn't see yet. Nell said she'd stake the back door key. The vine tightened around her wrist before she'd finished the sentence.

They played until the gas lamps guttered. Every hand Bet won, a leaf opened on Nell's side of the table, and every hand Nell won, a thorn drew a bead of blood from Bet's knuckles, so neither could stop without the other paying. By dawn the cards were sticky with sap, the stranger had gone, and the spade on the baize still wouldn't dry.

They never did settle the debt. Nell kept the key, Bet kept the bruises, and the pair of them carried that vine out of the hotel in their heads for the rest of their days. Every time one of them cut a deck, she'd look first for the green creeping up the edge. Pass me that sugar, Priya, and mind the lid. That's how you know a bargain's fair: it pricks both parties the same.