Close view of a pale hand with four small playing card suit tattoos on the fingers: a black spade, a red heart, a black club and a red diamond.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Playing card suit tattoos on fingers

Hand · Mixed · Photo

Four small playing card suit symbols sit across the fingers of a hand resting on a light fabric. The black spade, black club, red heart and red diamond use solid fills with simple outlines. The warm, sunlit photograph shows the hand from above with coral nail polish, and the tattoos are the clear focus.

Hand Playing card Spade Heart Club Diamond Suit Hand Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down before the tide turns, and don't touch the cards until I've finished with them. Old Tam Rennie kept his deck in a tobacco tin in the wheelhouse of the Morning Star, and every winter he dealt four hands before the fleet put out, one for each suit, because a skipper needs to know what the sea is going to ask of him.

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The spades were for the nets, black and heavy, the work that sank a careless man. Clubs were for the boys who came aboard at fourteen, all knuckles and bluster. Hearts went to the widows on the quay, and the diamonds, red as a sprat's belly in the morning light, were for the catch that paid the rent. Tam never let anyone else shuffle. He said a deck handled by a landlubber would deal you a wreck.

The winter of the great blow, young Iris Pell, who had taken her father's place at the winch, lost a bet to Tam over a bottle of rum and the right to fish the Bank first. She had four cards to play and only one hand to play them with. She laid down the heart, then the diamond, and Tam laughed so hard he coughed his pipe onto the chart table. 'Girl,' he said, 'the sea doesn't care about pride, only about who turns up sober.' She sailed first the next morning and came home with the biggest haul in the harbour.

Tam's tin is still on the wheelhouse shelf. Four cards are missing from the deck, and nobody in the fleet has ever found them, though the spades and clubs have been dealt a great many times since.