Four tribal-style playing card suit designs, a spade, heart, diamond and club, drawn in black and red on a white background.

Tribal playing card suit designs

Mixed · Flash

The image shows four separate playing card suit symbols arranged in a grid on a white background: a black spade, a red heart, a red diamond and a black club. Each is built from bold, tapering tribal-style curves and sharp points with solid fills and open white negative space. The two colours are kept apart, with black used for the spade and club and red for the heart and diamond, giving a balanced, symmetrical composition.

Spade Heart Diamond Club Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had taken the deck from the novices in March, and by Lent it had found its way back to me, as things do in a house where nobody is allowed to own anything. I kept it in the bell tower under a loose board beside the rope, wrapped in a sheet of old vellum so the damp would not get at the corners.

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Four suits, each drawn by hand in the scriptorium by a man who had never seen a real card, working from a description given him by a sailor who had lost a wager to the prior. He gave the spade a point like a blade. The club he drew as three round leaves, which the abbot said looked like the Trinity and Brother Ruben swore looked like the cabbages in the kitchen garden. The heart he cut in red and split at the top like a fork, and the diamond he made a red arrow pointing nowhere in particular.

The night before the bishop's visit I laid them out on the stone floor of the tower in the order the sailor had taught us, and dealt myself a hand against the wind coming through the louvres. Spades for the dead, the sailor had said, clubs for the living who worked the land, hearts for what you lose, diamonds for the money you were promised. When I turned over the last card it was the club, black and ribbed like a rose window seen from below. Beneath it, pressed into the wood by the weight of the bell, I found a scrap of paper in Anselm's cramped hand: Burn the rest. Keep the club.