Traditional style flash design of a tarot card with three swords, a watchful eye, a heart and roses, with no body placement shown.

Three of Swords tarot flash design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A tarot card style design labelled III and SWORDS, with three swords crossing a golden heart that frames an open eye. A red flame backdrop, coiled snake shapes, roses and scrollwork fill the composition, with a banner at the base. Bold outlines and solid fills in red, gold, grey and black give it a traditional flash look.

Traditional Sword Eye Heart Rose Flame Snake Banner Roman numeral Scrollwork Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old sexton of Holcombe Parva kept the church garden the way his mother had kept it, with roses along the south wall and nothing growing where the graves were too close together. One March, a stranger came up the lane with a sack of seed potatoes and asked for the key to the tool shed. He said his name was Ambrose Tull and that he had come to dig up the thing buried under the yew.

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The sexton asked what thing. Tull said he did not know its name, only that his grandmother had walked from Ledbury to bury it there, a heart wrapped in a red cloth with three knives laid across it so it would not wake. The sexton had lived in that village sixty years and never heard of it. He gave Tull the key anyway, because the yew was dying and somebody would have to cut it down.

They dug for two days. On the third, the spade rang on iron, and under the roots they found three blades laid in a cross, rust-brown and crumbling, and between them a cloth gone to dust. Nothing else. No heart. Only a single rose, pressed flat and still red, lying where the heart should have been.

Tull picked it up and laughed, a short sound. He said his grandmother had told him the knives were to hold the heart shut, and the eye was to watch it, and the flame was to keep it warm. The sexton looked at the empty hole for a long while. Then he said the yew could stay standing, since the thing it had been guarding had already walked off, and he went to put the kettle on.