Tattoo Tarot: Ink & Intuition

Above: Justice, Temperance and King of Cups from Tattoo Tarot: Ink & Intuition, showing the pack's bold vintage tattoo style.

Justice, Temperance and King of Cups from Tattoo Tarot: Ink & Intuition, illustrated by Megamunden.

Tattoo Tarot: Ink & Intuition was published by Laurence King Publishing in 2018, with text by Diana McMahon Collis and illustrations by Oliver Munden, working under the name Megamunden. The pack uses the bold outlines, limited colours and decorative imagery of vintage tattoo designs throughout its tarot cards.

The cards use a limited palette of cream, black, red, green and ochre, with traditional tarot titles. The pack follows the Rider-Waite Tarot framework, reworking its recognisable figures and scenes through Megamunden’s own description of his work as combining “vintage skate art, psychedelia, renaissance art, and most notably European, American and Japanese tattoo aesthetics”. The major arcana and court cards feature boldly drawn figures, while the minor suits retain their traditional names and symbols, with each card built around ornate illustrations of roses, flames, flowers, eyes and other tattoo-inspired imagery.

The set contains 78 cards in a lidded box and a 28-page booklet explaining card meanings and readings. The booklet and card set make it suitable both for collectors and for people learning how to read tarot.

The deck was developed as a collaboration between publisher, tarot consultant and illustrator: McMahon Collis contributed the accompanying text and input into the deck designs, while Munden created the card images.