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Motif · motif_playing_cards

Playing Cards

Playing cards, drawn fanned or scattered. Attested only as a COMPONENT of the Man's Ruin composition, and that is how the edge is scoped: the source gives the meaning to the assembled group, never to the cards on their own.
Thin
Low confidenceresearched

1 attested · 1 promoted1 source · T2

What the research says

motifs_seed
Category
object
Variants
fanned hand; aces; scattered cards
Common styles
american traditional
Common themes
vice
Composition behaviors
drawn in the background of a Man's Ruin composition

Provenance

1 resolved

  • Man's Ruin, what else? (opens in a new tab)

    Tier 2

    Maggie Whales, Tattoo Life

    Tattoo magazine feature on the Man's Ruin composition. Verbatim, INCLUDING the page's own spelling and grammar, transcribed faithfully rather than corrected: "a long-stemmed cocktail glasss with an fallen woman, playing cards in the background and a weapon, like a gun or knife, to complete the picture". States the composition "brings together the vices which cause the downfall of man, all those things which man cannot control". This is a COMPOSITION-level meaning: the reading belongs to the assembled group, and this batch edges it to the component objects only with that scope written on each edge.

    professional tattoo source · published 2022-05-19 · retrieved 2026-08-30

Related concepts

2 links

Can symbolize · 1

  • → outgoingViceSymbolThin
    strength 0.25researched

    COMPOSITION-SCOPED, not object-scoped, and the strength records that. The source describes the assembled image - “playing cards in the background” among the components - and gives the meaning to the whole: the composition “brings together the vices which cause the downfall of man, all those things which man cannot control”. Cards outside that composition are not covered.

Frequently used in · 1

  • → outgoingAmerican TraditionalStyleThin
    strength 0.50promoted · not an independent attestationresearched

    Promoted from motifs_seed.common_styles of motif_playing_cards ('american traditional'). No new fact: this edge restates a value already present in the corpus. STRENGTH 0.5 set by the T11.11c rule: this pairing is asserted by ONE parent row's association column and by no second row; the pack's scale reads 0.5 as 'context-dependent'. Inputs are corpus counts only - no source count, tier or confidence is used.