Traditional style tattoo of three playing aces and two dice behind a ribbon reading Life's A Gamble, on a limb, with grey shading and small red accents.

Playing cards and dice with Life's A Gamble banner

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows three playing aces fanned behind a scrolled ribbon that reads Life's A Gamble, with two dice in front of the lower ribbon. The linework is bold and the cards and dice are shaded in grey to give them volume, with the ribbon shaded in lighter tones. Small areas of red appear on the heart and diamond pips, while the rest of the design is black and grey, and the composition is centred on the subject.

Traditional Other Playing card Dice Banner Ribbon Lettering Spade Heart Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, you'll not believe what Cudworth did on the Tuesday watch, so I'm setting it down straight while the ink's still wet. We were four days out of Hull with a deck of cards gone soft as cloth from handling, and the dice were the cook's, carved from a scrap of ship's oak. Cudworth had been losing since Gibraltar, every penny of his pay gone into the bosun's pot, and he swore he'd not go ashore a beggar.

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Then he turned up the last hand and there they were, three aces fanned out like bunting at a regatta: a spade, a heart with its red pips bright under the lamp, and a diamond. The bosun went pale as milk. Nobody speaks of luck at sea, but a man can smell it, same as weather coming.

Cudworth didn't crow. He pushed the whole pot across and said the dice would settle it, then rolled them on the oilcloth. Two sixes, black as coal on cream. The bosun laughed till he coughed. Then he picked up the carved pair himself and tipped them, and they came up sixes too, and that's when we all went quiet, because nobody aboard had ever seen the same double twice in one night.

Here's the joke, Nell. Cudworth came off the boat at Hull with nothing but the ribbon from his old cap in his fist and the bosun's note for four pounds. He says life's a gamble. I say he's a fool who should have kept his aces.