Black lettering on an off-white background forming a playing card spade, with the words We're all mad here set in flowing and block letters.

Spade lettering reading We're all mad here

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black lettering design arranged in the shape of a playing card spade, with the words WE'RE ALL MAD HERE. The letters mix flowing script with bold, condensed capitals, and the stem of the spade is built from stacked block letters. The flat black ink sits on a plain off-white ground with no shading or colour.

Lettering Spade Playing card Lettering Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lorry queue at Dover ran back past the car park by a quarter to four, and Inspector Dorothy Vane had already stamped forty passports that said nothing interesting. Then a man in a waxed coat slid a tin across the counter and said, quite calmly, that it contained playing cards and was not for smuggling, whatever the X-ray had suggested. She opened it. Every card was a spade, drawn in flat black ink on off-white card, with words twisting round the shape so tightly she had to tilt her head to read them. WE'RE ALL MAD HERE, the top one said, in a script that looped like a skipping rope.

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"Is that a declaration?" she asked. "Only it isn't on the form."

"It's a sentiment," said the man. "Your sort of place generates a great many of them. I'd tick the box marked sentiment if you have one." He had a hat he did not take off. Behind her the radio crackled that the Calais boat was late and the Belgians were sending someone over with a clipboard. Dorothy turned the cards over one by one. The stems were built from stacked block capitals, each letter leaning slightly, as if the whole spade were trying to stand up in a wind.

She found the ace last, folded inside the lid. It had no words at all, only a small arrow pointing down at the stem, where someone had drawn a tiny door. Dorothy looked at the man. He looked at the clock, which said ten to four and was, she noticed, running backwards. "Through you go," she said, and stamped his papers with a thump that left a black smudge on her thumb. On the drive home she caught her reflection in the windscreen and, for no reason she could name, smiled at it like a card player who had already won.