Black ink tribal-style spade design drawn on white paper, with swirling curls, tapering points and small dot accents.

Tribal spade design

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a spade symbol built from bold black tribal shapes with white negative space. Swirling curls and sharp tapering points form the outline and interior, with small dots placed near the top and along the base. It is rendered in solid black ink on white paper with no shading or colour.

Spade Playing card Tribal Swirl Dot

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz, the officer at Coquelles unpacked my suitcase on the steel table and shook out every shirt as if a card might drop from a sleeve. Fourteen decks, three pairs of dice, and a tin of Nan's shortbread he sniffed before handing back. He wanted to know what a grown woman did with that many packs of cards. I told him I dealt patience to people who had none, which is the truth, and it got me a stamp on the wrong page.

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The spade was the one thing I kept in my coat. You remember Dad's old ace, the black one with the curled stem he cut from a tobacco tin lid and blacked in with Indian ink? He used to lay it face up on the kitchen oilcloth and say the trick was never the winning. The trick was knowing which way the pattern turns before the other person does. I have spent twenty years learning those swirls. The points run one way, the dots pull the eye round, and the white inside the black always looks as if it might tip out onto the floor.

At the crossing I took it out and pressed it flat against the glass of the waiting room, dots facing the window. A boy in a hi-vis jacket watched me do it and asked if it was lucky. I said only if you were already losing, and he laughed as if I'd meant it kindly.

I am sending the tin back with this. Keep the shortbread out of the dice, and tell Mum the spade is with me, where it belongs.