Sheet of playing card suit designs in red and black, with plain solid symbols on the top row and ornate dotwork-style symbols below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Playing card suit tattoo flash sheet

Dotwork · Mixed · Flash

The sheet shows eight playing card suit symbols arranged in two rows: a diamond, spade, heart and club in solid red and black on top, and four ornamental versions below. The lower designs use fine dotted outlines, filigree and decorative interior patterns in black on white. The colour is limited to red and black on a plain white background, and the symbols are evenly spaced.

Dotwork Playing card Suit Diamond Spade Heart Club Ornament Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hester Vane cut card stock in a back room above a chandler's on Wapping Wall, and she made four marks for the suits that were never quite the same twice. The plain ones she sold to sailors who wanted a quick hand. The fancy ones lived in a biscuit tin under the counter, and only people who asked for them got a look.

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One January a lad called Tobias Quill came up the stairs with frozen fingers and a debt to a man named Gorrie. He wanted a suit that would not lose. Hester laid out the ornamental sheet and told him what each one was for. The spade dug graves, the heart bled at its edges, and the diamond was a window into a house that was not his. He chose the club, the one with its rings of dots packed tight, and she inked it with a fine nib while the stove ticked.

He carried it through the spring and won more than he had any right to. The men who had laughed at him stopped laughing and began to watch his hands. Then one night at the Prospect table Gorrie asked him to lay the club face up, and Tobias saw what Hester had done. The dots were not decoration. Each ring held one hand he had taken, there were eleven rings, and he had won eleven.

He went back up the stairs before dawn and found the tin open. Hester sat with her spectacles pushed up, and beside her lay a scrap of paper with a twelfth dot already waiting. "Every pot needs a ledger," she said, and held out the nib.