Four bare feet arranged on an orange carpet, each with a small solid black spade or diamond tattoo on the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Playing card suit ankle tattoos

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Four bare feet meet in the centre of an overhead shot on a textured orange carpet. Each ankle carries a small, solid black tattoo of a playing card suit, with spades on three ankles and a diamond on the fourth. The simple flat fills show no shading, and the small motifs sit clearly against the skin.

Ankle Spade Diamond Playing card

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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

The ferry had been cancelled for the third day running, and the Harbour Inn on Skerra had run out of everything except candles and a deck of cards with one corner chewed. Marguerite Vail dealt the last hand of the evening across a table made from a pier plank the gale had thrown up on the shingle. Opposite her sat Tom Abernethy, who owed the ferry company money and the harbourmaster an apology, and beside him Ruth from the chandlery, shuffling with a bank clerk's precision.

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They were playing for the stove. The loser of each round mended the net in the morning, and nobody wanted to mend the net. The lamp smoked. Outside, the sea kept working at the slipway as if it had a grudge against it. Tom called spades, then diamonds, then spades again, and each time the cards turned up the way he had told them they would, which was the first thing that made Marguerite suspicious.

On the final hand she held the queen of spades and the ace of diamonds, and she understood the trick. Every one of them had been to the same tattooist in Oban the summer they were nineteen, and every one had picked a suit and sworn to mark it on the ankle so they could never pretend they had not been there. Tom had chosen spades for himself and diamonds for the dealer who had never been paid. She laid her cards down, pushed the stake across, and said nothing, because the answer was already in the chewed corner of the deck, and in the old marks they had all agreed to keep.