Black and grey lettering design reading Play the Hand You're Dealt, with a pencilled spade and playing cards above and flourishes around the script, drawn as a flash design with no body placement

Play the Hand You're Dealt lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn lettering design in black ink and pencil on white paper, reading Play the Hand You're Dealt in large flowing script. Three playing cards fanned out above the word Play, with a spade symbol on the front card, and ornamental swirls and shaded lines surround the letters. The shading is in grey pencil and the composition is centred and vertical.

Lettering Lettering Script Playing card Spade Swirl Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cards are already on the upturned crate when you reach the packing shed, three of them fanned like a bad excuse: a seven, a jack, and the nine of spades. Uncle Tomas doesn't look up from the Egremont Russets he's sorting. Outside, the late August light lies thick across the rows, and the wasps are drunk on windfalls under the Bramleys.

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Two pennies a point, he says, and you've got eleven pence of pickers' wages in your pocket and nothing you can afford to lose. He deals you in. Your hand is a four, a deuce and a king, which is nothing, the sort of hand that sends a man home early. You look at the door. You look at the crates stacked to the rafters, every one of them your sweat and his name stencilled on the side.

"Play the hand you're dealt," Tomas says, not unkindly, nudging the nine of spades toward the middle with one knuckle. "Trees don't give you a better crop because you wanted one." You don't believe him, but you believe the wasps and the light, so you lay down the king and the deuce and say nothing at all.

He takes the pot with a pair of sevens he's been keeping up his cuff all along, and laughs until he coughs. You walk out past the Bramleys with less money than you came with and a crate of windfalls on your shoulder that he insists is your share. Behind you the packing shed door bangs shut on its hinge, and the orchard goes on ripening as if nothing was ever at stake.