Four playing card suit symbols, a spade, diamond, club and heart, in black and red ink with splattered edges, running down the centre of a person's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Playing card suits down the back

Back · Mixed · Photo

Four playing card suit symbols are stacked vertically down the centre of the back, from top to bottom a black spade, a red diamond, a black club and a red heart. Each shape has a soft, loose edge with ink splatter and drips around it, rather than clean outlines. The skin is shown in close framing with a dark red bra strap along the bottom edge.

Back Spade Diamond Club Heart Playing card Splatter Ink drip

Find an artist for this

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

Gerald still had the deck in his jacket pocket, thirty-one years on, the cards gone soft as flannel. He took them out under the function room table at the reunion, shuffling with his thumbs the way Mr Pryce had forbidden us to do in Latin.

Keep reading

We had played for fruit gums in the squash court changing room, the summer the lino was up and nobody could be bothered to stop us. Dennis knocked the ink pot over on the third hand, and it flew across the cards in a black spatter that caught the reds too. After that no one could tell a spade from a club at a glance, so we made our own rules. Black was for anything that could bite. Red was for anything that could bleed. Gerald said the drips were the real suits and the shapes were only the lids.

Dennis, now a solicitor with a bald patch he apologised for twice, claimed Gerald still owed him a Mars bar. Gerald dealt four cards face up onto the beige tablecloth, and for a moment none of us touched them. The spade was a black smudge with its spikes running off into nothing. The heart was red and wet-looking, its drips still soft at the edges.

"Pick one," Gerald said. "Whichever you'd have bet the whole pot on at fourteen."

Dennis reached for the spade. Gerald, very quietly, slid the heart back into his pocket and said that was the one he had been saving since 1993.