Playing Cards Tattoo Meaning

Fate, chance, the hand you're dealt, and the courage to play it.

The four suits are the four estates of medieval society.

This is one theory. The cups represent the clergy — the chalice of the mass. The swords represent the nobility — the sword of the knight. The coins represent the merchants — money, trade, the commercial class. The clubs (originally batons or wands) represent the peasantry — the agricultural tool, the staff of labor. The entire social order of medieval Europe encoded in a deck of cards, shuffled and dealt randomly, the hierarchy dissolved into chance with each shuffle.

The cards arrived in Europe from the Islamic world in the late 14th century — mamluk playing cards, using cups, coins, swords, and polo sticks as suits. The polo sticks became batons became clubs in the European transformation. The face cards were added: the king, the queen (who appeared and immediately became the most powerful card in many games), the jack who served them.

The Tarot began as a playing card game — tarocchi, played in northern Italy in the 15th century, the trump cards (the major arcana) added as a fifth suit. They were not used for divination until the 18th century, when French occultists decided the images contained ancient Egyptian wisdom. They did not. They contained 15th-century Italian allegorical art. But the meanings attached to the images in the 18th century had their own logic, their own coherence, and they worked as a system of reflection — the cards holding up images to the person reading them, the person reading meanings into images that had been designed for an entirely different purpose.

The playing card is the image of chance imposed on order: the hierarchy of suits and values, perfectly organized, perfectly randomized by the shuffle. Every hand dealt from the same deck by the same rules. What you do with what you're dealt is the only variable.

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