Close photo of a fine line outline tattoo of four playing card suits, a diamond, club, spade and heart, on the inner forearm, with silver and blue evil eye bangles worn on the wrist.

Playing card suit outlines on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Four playing card suit symbols are drawn as thin black outlines in a diagonal row across the inner forearm: a diamond, club, spade and heart, each unshaded and evenly spaced. The linework is simple and clean with no shading or fill, and the ink appears grey-black against the skin. The photo is a casual, slightly off-centre snapshot with the forearm in the foreground, a striped top and a wrist bangle stack in the frame.

Fine line Forearm Playing card Diamond Club Spade Heart

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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, the lot of you, and keep your hands where Cook can see them, because the pot's not stirring itself and I've no patience left for dealing. Pass the biscuit tin. Right. You've all heard of the four cousins who sailed out of Grimsby with one pack of cards between them. No? Then you've been listening to the wrong men.

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The eldest was Ada Thorne, who could cut a deck so clean you'd swear the cards had grown wings. She kept the diamonds, the club, the spade and the heart in her head rather than in her pocket, and she'd draw them on a scrap of sailcloth whenever the weather turned mean, four plain shapes with no colour in them, because colour cost money and she was saving for a berth of her own.

The ship was the Hesper Lass, a coal boat bound for Riga with a cook who drank his rum neat and a mate who lost every hand he played. Somewhere past the Skagerrak the sea came up green over the bow and took the galley door clean off its hinges. Ada was in there with the kettle. She came out with the kettle still in her fist and the pack of cards gone soft as bread from the wet, and she laid the four suits out on the table in a row, one after the other, the way you'd lay out a route.

Now here's the part the mate never believed. Every card she turned that night came up showing the same suit as the last, and the tide, which had been running against them, turned round like a dog told to sit. The heart was the last one she laid down. It was the plainest of the four, and it was the one that brought them home.

Tidy enough? Good. Now deal, and mind Cook doesn't see that you've palmed the spade.