Black and grey traditional style tattoo on a forearm showing a hand holding a tarot card with a moon and sun, with a snake wrapped around the arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tarot card, hand and snake on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand holding up a tarot card with a sun and crescent moon at the top, a central emblem, and the numeral XVIII above the lower text. A snake coils around the card and the forearm, and the hand wears a ring with an eye motif. The work uses bold outlines and grey shading on a light skin tone against a dark background.

Traditional Forearm Moon Sun Hand Snake Ring Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third night of the thaw the wells of Carrow had begun to hum, and the Chancellor sent for a card reader before the ice had properly left the courtyard. Madame Sable was too ill to climb the tower stair, so I went up in her place with the pack wrapped in oilcloth under my arm and my mother's ring cold against my finger. The Chancellor took one look at my hands and said they would do.

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I laid the Moon face up on the flagstones. Two beasts, one pale and one dark, stood at the lip of a pool, and between them a path ran up toward a tower that was not quite finished. Above them the sun and the crescent shared a single face, which I did not like. The Chancellor asked what it meant. I told him the truth: the Moon is the card of things seen only in half light, of rivers that run beneath cities, of mistakes that have not yet happened.

Beneath the stones something moved, long and slow, the way the eel-men had said it would. A grey coil slid up through the drain channel, wound once around the Chancellor's boot, then climbed the card itself, tightening until the painted sun cracked along its rim. I set my palm flat on the Moon, the eye on my ring turned outward as my mother taught me, and I held the creature's gaze until it loosened and sank back into the dark.

The Chancellor paid me in silver and asked me to say nothing of the wells. I have kept my word for forty years. Each thaw I still take the pack from its oilcloth, lay the Moon down on the table, and count the cracks, because the card keeps the count for me. This spring there is one more than last year.