Black and grey skull set inside a large black playing card spade with a small white star at its base, tattooed on the chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull inside a spade on the chest

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded grey skull sits centred inside a solid black spade shape, with a small white star at the tip of the spade's stem. The skull uses soft grey shading and white highlights, while the spade is filled with flat black ink. Partial cursive lettering is visible at the top right edge of the frame, and the photo is taken straight on against pale skin.

Chest Skull Spade Playing card Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Barney Tresize had dealt cards in the back room of the Hook and Lantern for thirty-one winters, and in all that time nobody had seen him lose a hand he cared about. The room smelled of tar and wet oilskins, and the fishermen came in off the slip with their salt still on their wrists and bet on anything: the weather, the tide, whether Mrs Pascoe's cat would cross the quay before the bell. Barney never bet on anything. He only dealt.

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The night the harbourmaster's boy sat in, he put down a single ace of spades that looked like it had been cut from a slate roof. Pressed into the middle was a skull, grey and careful, as if somebody had drawn bone inside the shadow of a mourning hat. Barney laughed until he saw the boy's face. The pot grew. The boy pushed his father's boat keys onto the felt and said nothing at all.

Barney folded the hand he should have played. Afterwards, while the lamps guttered, the boy turned the card over and tapped the small white star at the foot of its stem. His grandfather had told him the star was the point a boat steers for when the fog comes down, the one light nobody can mistake. Barney thought of the men the sea had kept over the years, and of the names he had never once been asked to say aloud.

He slid the keys back across the table, one finger at a time. "Take them home," he said. "I've been waiting for someone to bring me a card I couldn't win."