Black line drawing of a vertical tribal-style band with a spade, diamond, club and heart, shown as a tattoo design without skin visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Playing card suits in a tribal band

Black and grey · Flash

A vertical design of thick black tribal-style bands that twist around each other and enclose four playing card suits: a spade, a diamond, a club and a heart. The linework is solid black with no shading, and the suits sit in the gaps where the bands cross. The image is a plain black design on a white background.

Spade Diamond Club 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

The hedge along the north wall had been Grandad's pride for forty years, two yew stems trained to climb round each other until they looked like wrestlers who had forgotten how to let go. By the summer my cousins and I were grown, nobody could trim it without swearing, because every crossing held a hollow, and in each hollow he had wired a playing card suit cut from old biscuit tin in the shed.

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Spade sat at the top where the sun came first, diamond on the left by the water butt, club low down near the mower, and heart at the bottom where the wrens nested. Every August we played cards on the trestle table under the hedge, and Grandad insisted the suits were watching, so nobody was allowed to cheat. Aunt Maud cheated anyway, sliding an ace out of her cardigan sleeve, and he laughed so hard he had to sit down on the water butt.

The autumn the house went on the market, I took the shears up the stepladder to clear the top and found the spade wire had snapped years ago and the tin had rusted into lace. I stood there a long time with the blades open. Then I climbed down, hung the shears on their nail in the shed, and left the hedge exactly as it was.

The estate agent wanted it gone and said buyers preferred straight lines. On viewing day a young couple stopped at the gate, squinting at the twisted yew. Is the hedge staying? I said it was staying. The spade had fallen out, but the other three still held, and the wrens had already moved in under the heart.