Four small black tattoos of a spade, a crown, a second crown and a club sit across the fingers of a hand with red nail polish.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Playing card suit tattoos on fingers

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand with red nail polish rests against a person's chin and neck, with four small black tattoos across the fingers. The motifs are a spade, a plain crown, an ornate crown and a club, drawn as solid black silhouettes with minimal detail. The image is in full colour overall, with a light neutral background and a soft, even light.

Hand Spade Crown Club Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fleet had been short of hands since the spring gales, so when the stranger came down the slip at Skerrow with a pack of cards in his coat, nobody asked where he had come from. He wanted only a place on the Mary Kell and a game once the boats were hauled. Old Tam Rennie, who had lost three sons to the sea and had a crew of boys to feed, said yes to both.

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They played on upturned fish boxes by the net store, a candle standing in a jam jar. The stranger dealt quick and kept his cards face down until the last. Every night he won a little, never much, and every night he asked the table for something small: a fish from the morning's catch, a coin, a fathom of tarred rope. The men paid because it was cheap. By the back end of the herring season he had the names of every boat in the harbour written on his tally, and the sea had gone quiet in a way nobody liked.

Ewan Rennie sat in on the last night. He watched the stranger's hands, which were quick, and then he watched the cards, which were not quite the right weight. Under the candle the spade was the only one with a point to it. The stranger laid down a club and said that clubs were for work and work was owed. Ewan turned over a crown instead and set it beside the spade. "A crown is only a crown until someone sits under it," he said.

The stranger laughed, and the laugh went out over the water like a gull. They played until the lamp guttered. Ewan lost his coin, then his knife, then the Mary Kell's name painted on the board. At first light the stranger walked down the slip with the tally under his arm, and the boat went out to the grounds with a full crew and a lighter hold. Nobody at Skerrow played at the net store again.