Black and grey line drawing of a skull-faced queen in a crown on a playing card, with a broken heart balloon, a spider and swords, shown as a flash design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Queen of hearts skull playing card design

Black and grey · Flash

A black and white illustration of a playing card queen with a skull face, a crown and ornate patterned robes. A broken heart balloon, a spider on a thread, crossed swords and corner Q and heart suit marks surround her against a background of radiating stripes and a spider web. The linework is dense and detailed, using hatching and stippling with no colour.

Queen Skull Crown Playing card Balloon Spider Web Sword Heart Suit Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Agnes Pell had dealt from the same worn pack for forty years, and she never let it leave the clearing at the edge of Ashcombe Wood. Tobias Venn came there in November with his last shilling and a debt he had not told his wife about. The stump where they played was grey with rain, and above it a spider's thread hung from the oak like a plumb line, turning slowly in the still air.

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"Cut for the queen," Agnes said, and her hand shook as she held the deck out to him. He drew the Queen of Hearts and found beneath her crown a face with the lips gone and the teeth bared in a grin, the black hair falling over her shoulders in long hatched strokes. Agnes tapped the card with one yellow nail. "She keeps what she's given. Play for what you want to keep."

Tobias played for the shilling, then for the rent, then for the small brass locket his wife had given him at their wedding. Each time he lost, a heart went up out of the card's corner, cut loose like a balloon string, and drifted into the branches. He heard it snap as it rose. He won once, a single hand of nines, and the spider ran down its line and touched his cuff as if to claim its share.

At dusk he had nothing left to stake but the queen herself. He turned up the last card and it was the Queen again, dealt by a hand that was not Agnes's, for Agnes had gone home without a word. The stripes behind the lady spread outward like the rays of a sun going down, and Tobias understood, too late, that the forest had been keeping the score all along.