Deck Review: The Winding

The Winding is a nature-themed deck created by Stephanie Burrows and illustrated by Adam Oehlers, the duo behind a whole host of decks for their publishing house Three Trees Tarot, including Oak, Ash & Thorn and Heartwood. Their previous collaborations are on my radar as they’re v. popular decks, and I absolutely get why: they’re undeniably beautiful. BUT they’ve generally been a little too whimsical-animals-skipping-through-Farthing-Woods*-y for my personal tastes. Apparently I have no soul, lol. In reality, I’m just not much of a cute-animal-deck person, and both Oak, Ash & Thorn and Heartwood sit slightly too far towards the twee end of the spectrum for me.

The Winding, though, absolutely grabbed me from the get-go. It’s still cute – I challenge you to stare into that tiny spider’s enormous wet eyes and not be overwhelmed with d’awwwwwww – but there’s something punchier and a little stranger about it that really appeals to me. I think the decision to work entirely in black and white helps. Burrows describes the absence of colour as allowing “line, texture, shadow, and negative space” to take over, letting atmosphere and storytelling lead the reading, and I think that choice particularly suits Oehlers’ style. His intricate pen work and crosshatching really get to shine, while the stark monochrome takes just enough of the sugary sweetness out of the woodland whimsy for my cold, dead heart, lol.

The creators explain that The Winding takes place in the same world as Heartwood. That deck is set around an abandoned cottage in the forest, gradually reclaimed by nature and populated by all manner of tiny creatures; its Fool is a mouse who sets off to explore its mysterious rooms and inhabitants. This time our protagonist is a tiny jumping spider, living in an old wooden shed at the back of the Heartwood property, who leaves the safety of home and ventures first into the forest and eventually towards the nearest village. So, if you’re a fan of Heartwood, I imagine this feels super cool – like playing a computer game you love and suddenly unlocking a whole new area beyond the edge of the old map.

And being a tiny lil cute spider in an enormous world is, obviously, quite freakin’ perilous. You can be eaten. You can be stepped on. Someone can spot you in their bath and decide that this town simply isn’t big enough for the both of you, and turn on the Great Tap of Doom. Because even though I think this spider is adorbs, lots of people very much Do Not Like Spiders, lol. But Burrows stresses that our little spider doesn’t really know any of this. They head out into the world with an innocence that makes the journey surprisingly poignant. Their winding path becomes a metaphor for the way we make our own way through life: slowly, uncertainly, no idea what might wait around the next corner, but carrying on regardless. Burrows describes this as a deck about “exploration and courage”, about “moving gently and continuing on even when the path feels uncertain”.

Burrows discusses how she’d always wanted to make a spider deck, but that folks kept trying to talk her out of it because: ew, spiders. She disagrees, arguing that spiders are “remarkable, often misunderstood creatures”: tiny but ecologically important, and capable of a surprisingly broad range of behaviours. “Jumping spiders [in particular] are remarkably clever animals,” says visual ecologist Nathan Morehouse, pointing to research that shows they’re crafty and cunning, capable of planning, can count, and can assess risk. “I always find it delightful when something like a humble jumping spider punctures our sense of biological superiority.”

Part of what makes them so smart is likely their extraordinarily sharp vision. Unlike other spiders who build a web and wait for dinner to come to them, jumping spiders are active hunters: they head out into the world, finding, stalking, and pouncing on their prey. As animal behaviour researcher Ximena Nelson puts it, their vision has “emancipated them”, allowing them to explore their environment. Once you’re out wandering around, you need to spot predators, prey and potential mates from a distance, assess what you’re looking at, and decide what to do next. Nelson argues that this exploratory lifestyle may be precisely what has driven their “pretty remarkable cognition”.

So, the Winding is partly born from Burrow’s desire to show that there’s so much more to spiders than most of us realise – it’s an invitation to look – properly look – at something we’re accustomed to dismissing (or actively recoiling from!) and see it differently. And I really like how that maps on to Tarot. Tarot is pretty good at asking us to look again. To pay attention to things we’ve overlooked, interrogate our immediate reactions, shift our perspective, and notice connections that weren’t obvious at first glance. So there’s something pretty cool about making its guide a creature that inspires such an immediate ‘OH HELL NO’ response in so many people, and then drawing the little critter with enormous shiny Pixar cartoon eyes until we’re all emotionally invested in whether it makes it safely to the village.

Oehlers also has a keen interest in the quirky parts of the natural world, with his work consistently drawn towards nature, fairytales, and what he calls a “soft kind of magic, with hidden sprites and creatures that are almost a part of the landscape.” There’s a strong nostalgic impulse to his illustrations, too. He talks about wanting to recapture the childhood sense that the ordinary world might contain something extraordinary if you look at it in quite the right way – an idea that has become even more important to him since having children himself. His art is about “trying to amplify the natural magic” already around us: “we are all still surrounded by a little magic, and though it’s difficult to see, it is there. You just have to look a little more closely sometimes.”

Visually, Oehlers’ work owes a clear debt to the Golden Age of Illustration. I can see shades of Arthur Rackham and Gustave Doré in there, alongside the intricate, gobliny fairytale worlds of Brian Froud. One description of his work that I absolutely love calls it a “honey-flavoured mutant cross between Jules Verne and Hans Christian Andersen” 😂 and – yes! – there’s Victorian fairytale and steampunk jostling together: beautiful and whimsical for sure, but also dark and odd.

One of the reasons Burrows and Oehlers make such natural collaborators is their shared love for the author and illustrator Edward Gorey. Burrows’ route into Tarot began when she discovered Gorey’s wonderfully macabre Fantod Pack tucked away amongst her mother’s craft supplies. Already a fan of his work, she was immediately hooked by its mixture of dark humour, strangeness, and impending doom, and her fascination with the deck eventually led her deeper into Tarot. Gorey is also a major influence on Oehlers, who credits him with turning his own attention towards pen and ink; before long, he says, everything he drew was covered in the “lovely gritty texture” produced by crosshatching. And it isn’t only Gorey’s technique that interests him, but his storytelling: “the moments he chooses to capture.” I think you can really see that in The Winding. These aren’t simply pretty illustrations of Tarot concepts; they feel like frozen moments from a story already in progress, as though something happened immediately before we arrived and something else will happen the moment we pop the lid back on the deck.

The Deck: Look, Feel, and Finish

The Winding consists of the 78 standard Tarot cards, plus seven bonus cards (inc. the super cute Lucky Spider card photographed above!) The bonus cards include four suitless Royals – Page, Knight, Queen and King – representing the broader court energies of learning, doing, caring, and leading. These can be used to set the tone of a reading or pulled in as clarifiers.

The cards are standard Tarot size (70 x 120mm), on really scrummy stock that is powdery but also slippery (apparently matte anti-scuff laminate – anyways, it’s v. nice to shuffle with!) The deck comes in a two-part grey box with a little hole in the bottom of the box so you can push the cards up and actually GET THE DAMN THINGS OUT. OMG, I love this. Why does every snug-fitting deck box not have this?! It’s such a cool little quality-of-life feature.

There’s no physical guidebook, but you get three double-sided reference cards which give you keywords at a glance, and then there’s a digital guidebook which goes into more detail about the meaning of each card. I know the lack of a physical guidebook can be a minus point for some, but I don’t mind it. And I do think you’ll want the guidebook here, at least while you’re getting to know the deck. Burrows explains that The Winding doesn’t always depict the literal number of objects associated with a card – five swords, three cups, etc. – instead conveying its meanings through “imagery, atmosphere, and visual storytelling”. As a result, some of the symbolism is less immediately obvious and beginner readers might struggle a bit. Burrows herself doesn’t describe The Winding as an advanced deck, but says it invites “a slower, more intuitive style of reading”, and I think that’s a pretty good description of it.

Greatest Hits: My Favourite Cards from The Winding

I really like this Fool because they actually look a little bit apprehensive to me. The traditional Fool is often that flinging-your-self-toward-a-cliff-edge-with-gleeful-abandon kinda vibe, when you’re too excited by the adventure to give much thought to what could go wrong. But our lil spider is still tucked beneath the safety of their leaf, peering out at that tantalising shaft of sunlight, and there’s something in those enormous shiny eyes that looks almost anxious. They know they have to choose whether to leave, and they’re not 100% convinced it’s a good idea.

I think that gives this Fool’s courage a slightly different flavour. This isn’t necessarily the bravery that comes from being too-naive-to-know-better; it’s the bravery of being nervous about what lies beyond your little patch of safety and going anyway. The light is beckoning, the wider world is out there, but our spider still has to decide to step into it. Given that The Winding is explicitly a deck about continuing onwards even when the path is uncertain, I think that makes this a particularly neat opening to their journey.

As y’all know, I love a good Easter Egg, and so I’m a big fan of the fact that the High Priestess features our spider navigating past a scattering of pomegranate seeds. Pomegranates are one of the most recognisable symbols on the traditional RWS High Priestess (where they appear on the veil behind her), and they’re generally associated with the myth of Persephone. After Persephone is abducted into the Underworld by her creepy rapey husband-uncle Hades, she eats pomegranate seeds which bind her to return there for part of every year (Autumn & Winter), while her return to her mother Demeter brings the world back into bloom for the other half (Spring & Summer).

It’s a particularly good fit for the High Priestess because Persephone is herself a liminal figure, moving between worlds: maiden and Queen of the Underworld, life and death, light and darkness, winter and summer. And those pomegranate seeds carry ideas of hidden knowledge and consequences, too. Persephone doesn’t initially understand the significance of eating them; there is more going on than she knows. That fits beautifully with a card concerned with secrets, intuition, what lies beneath the surface – knowledge that may require a little decoding.

So I love that Oehlers hasn’t simply plonked a pomegranate curtain into the woods to make the RWS reference work. Instead, the familiar symbol has been broken down and scattered through the landscape, becoming something our tiny spider actually has to navigate. It’s a clever little nod to the traditional card without disrupting the world of The Winding.

I also can’t stop seeing a wolf’s head silhouette in that dark crack in the doorway, which I love because it’s like the start of a fairytale. It has that little creature, dark woods, unknown danger, off you go quality. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep but also, the night is dark and full of terrors. V. High Priestessy.

I really like the simplicity of the Hierophant. A big wooden arrow, literally nailed into place, points our spider along the established route: this is the way you’re supposed to go. But, as Burrows asks in the guidebook, do they follow it simply because someone else has decided that’s the correct path, or forge their own? I also like that Oehlers has drawn some (v beautiful!) bindweed here [the bane of my gardening life]. Traditions can be rather like bindweed: deeply rooted, persistent and tenacious, cropping up again and again and winding themselves so tightly around us that they can be remarkably difficult to escape. That doesn’t necessarily make them bad (I actually think bindweed is really pretty but not when it’s strangling everything else in my blimmin’ garden) – but it does mean it’s worth stopping occasionally to ask whether we actually want to follow where they’re leading us.

A beautiful Lovers card. The shadow of the dandelion head in the sunlight looks like another spider, an ephermeral shadow spider, dancer-light and beautiful, hovering above our little fuzzy jumper in a way that is mesmerising. It reminds me of the Lovers-as-reflection imagery I’ve loved in decks like the Divine Channels. For me, the Lovers isn’t really a card about romantic love per se, but about choice: recognising something that feels deeply aligned with who we are, and choosing to commit ourselves to it. And relationships can be part of that because other people act as mirrors. Sometimes we learn to recognise and love parts of ourselves because we first see them reflected back through the eyes of someone who loves us. There’s something rather beautiful, then, about our tiny spider looking up and apparently seeing this gorgeous, luminous version of themselves.

But there’s potentially a little warning nestled in there too, because the beautiful shadow spider isn’t real. It’s an accident of light, and that brings us back to the Lovers’ much older association with choosing wisely. Think Hercules at the crossroads, confronted with the difficult, rocky road of Virtue and the seductively easy road offered by Vice. What are we actually seeing when we become infatuated with someone, or something? Are we responding to what is really there, or to the gorgeous thing our own desires have projected onto it? A mirror can help us see ourselves more clearly, but a projection can show us only what we want to see.

We get another lovely bit of spider-as-reflection imagery in the Two of Cups. Here, our spider sits on the rim of a teacup, apparently enjoying a lil coffee shop meet cute with another spider on the matching cup opposite – except, of course, there is no other spider. They’re looking at their own reflection in the café window.

I really like the guidebook’s reading of this as self-love. The Two of Cups usually represents the bond formed between two people, but perhaps it can also speak to the first relationship we ever form: the one with ourselves. I’ve written about this before in relation to the Lubanko Tarot‘s Two of Cups: sometimes the first thread of connection we weave isn’t with somebody else, but the one that binds us to our own reflection – learning to offer ourselves the same tenderness, recognition, and affection we so readily offer another.

The Five of Cups is a deeply personal card for Burrows, commemorating her beloved dogs Audrey and Jack, both of whom she says were lost “far sooner than we were ready for”. Before reading the guidebook, I actually interpreted the scene slightly differently: I thought Audrey was the dog and Jack her owner, and imagined them reunited somewhere beyond the card, off on a celestial walk together while our spider pauses beside their memorial bench.

I love (and also don’t love, haha) this card because memorial benches are my emotional kryptonite. I would really like one when I die, and I find a lot of the ones I see on my walks around Southsea very affirming and comforting. Because they’re usually: mum, nan, dad, grandad etc. So they’re kind of happysad – we miss you, but you had a life well lived. But there’s one that’s from parents to a son lost at seventeen, and it’s heartbreaking because they describe him as so full of sparkling promise and potential. And for me that’s part of the tragedy of the Five of Cups, what-might-have-been not just what-was-had-and-lost.

Burrows writes that the Five of Cups speaks to “the weight of what’s gone, and the courage it takes to keep moving forward.” In most decks, “moving forward” is generic Five of Cups advice. Here, it feels earned because we’ve spent the entire deck literally watching our tiny little spider move forward along a path. Eventually the winding path inevitably takes you through places marked by loss.

The guidebook reads this Ten of Cups as a moment of uncomplicated contentment, and I do get that – warm sun, dandelion fluff, a tree-swing – lush! But I also find the card strangely melancholy. There’s something inherently wistful about an empty swing, particularly here, suspended in this vast, empty space. Someone hung it, and someone carved those little hearts into the wood. But whoever they were, they’re nowhere to be seen.

And thinking about it, that sense of absence runs throughout The Winding, and might be part of why I don’t find it twee despite all the tiny-animal whimsy. Our spider travels through a world full of traces of other lives rather than other lives themselves. Someone brewed the tea, nailed up the sign, engraved the bench, hung the swing; we just never meet them. It’s a bit Marie Celeste by way of The Borrowers energy. There’s something elegiac, almost post-apocalyptic about it in places, like our tiny protagonist is trekking through the beautiful detritus of a world whose inhabitants have mysteriously disappeared (there’s not even any other spiders!) I don’t think that’s remotely what the deck is intending to suggest, lol, but it gives Oehlers’ illustrations a haunting, slightly uncanny quality that I really love.

I love the little callback to the RWS Queen of Wands’ traditional sunflowers here, reimagined as a tin of Sunflower Yellow paint. Bright, bold, and guaranteed to make a statement when you enter a room painted with it – just like the Queen herself.

I often think of the King of Wands as the rock star of the Tarot, but I actually think the conductor imagery here might capture him even better. You still get all that commanding presence and raw fiery charisma, but conducting also requires vision, leadership, planning and control: the ability to take dozens of individual parts and direct them towards one coherent whole.

When I first saw the Six of Swords, I thought Spidey was hitching a ride on the boots of a human occupant to safely get across the puddle. But on second thoughts (and in my dystopia frame of mind, haha), I think the boots are empty. Which works well for the Six of Swords – objects made for travelling, left behind while our tiny protagonist is the one who keeps moving forward.

Likewise with the Eight of Swords, I initially thought Spidey had crawled under the glass themselves through that overhanging lip, and then got themselves panicked about being trapped even though they were the one to scuttle in there in the first place! But a closer look shows their thread ends abruptly beneath its rim: someone, some unseen human actor, has put the glass over them. I think this adds an interesting layer of meaning to the card, because humans often trap spiders under glasses precisely because we’re about to rescue them. From Spidey’s perspective, an impenetrable prison has suddenly descended from the sky; from ours, they may be thirty seconds away from a newspaper being slid under the glass so they can be carried somewhere safer. Being unable to see a way out doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t one.

The Ace of Pentacles is another beautifully simple one: a single forgotten coin gleaming in the otherwise empty drawer of an ornate old-fashioned till, offering our spider a tiny treasure and a new opportunity. I’m also just an absolute sucker for these gorgeous antique cash registers – my favourite shop in Southsea has one (random shout out to Artisan Kitchens & Furniture for any local readers 😂) and I am OBSESSED. (It’s not for sale, alas).

A crossword is perhaps a slightly unexpected choice for the Three of Pentacles – I tend to think of them as pretty solitary pursuits – but I do get what Burrows is going for. We’ve probably all had that experience of staring blankly at a clue for a whole train journey, then showing it to someone else and having them immediately spot the answer. Or sometimes the very act of explaining what you’re stuck on suddenly makes the answer pop into your own head, like sharing it with another pair of eyes somehow unlocked it.

The cobwebby Four of Pentacles is pleasingly on the nose: Spidey has accumulated a little hoard of treasure and wrapped the whole lot tightly in webbing to keep it safe. But the image is also literally… y’know, cobwebs. Wealth hoarded for so long that it has become stagnant and neglected. Sure, you can’t lose your precious coins if you never let them go, but they can’t grow, circulate, benefit anyone else, or even bring you much pleasure while they’re sitting there gathering dust. Jeez, the Four of Pents is basically the Tarot’s socialist anti-billionaire card, isn’t it? 😂

The Five of Pentacles reads much darker to me than the guidebook suggests. We’re told the abandoned crutches are a reminder that “help is closer than you think”, but within this deck’s melancholy, deserted world, I find them rather ominous. Why are the crutches no longer needed, and where is the person who once relied on them? The falling autumn leaves only deepen that sense of absence and time passing; there’s something very where have all the flowers gone, long time passing about the whole thing. And it gives the traditional Five of Pentacles warning an unusually bleak edge: refuge may be close, but you have to reach for it. If you keep struggling alone indefinitely, eventually you may simply become overwhelmed.

The Page of Pentacles is the student of the Tarot, so I love our tiny scholar peering through an enormous pair of geeky reading glasses. Better still, they’re actually using the lens as a magnifying glass to examine the pentacle more closely: study here isn’t passive, it’s an act of curiosity, investigation, and really paying attention to what you’re trying to understand. I like the eye on the spine of the book too, emphasising the need to ‘open our eyes’, both literally and spiritiually, in order to learn. Knowledge isn’t just accumulated; it changes the observer and how they see the world. And given how much The Winding as a whole is about Burrows’s invitation to look again at a creature we think we already understand, that feels v. apt.

And the King of Pents made me laugh, as he is absolutely a man with a golf club membership! He has a nice car, understands his pension, knows a guy who can sort your extension, and is fastidious about the quality of the greens. I like the King of Pents, I’m not claiming he’s full country-club-arsehole, just that he’s reached the stage of life where financial security + leisure time + expensive hobby requiring patience and consistency to get good = golf 😂. No fiery Knight-of-Wands adrenaline here; the King of Pents is not an extreme sports enthusiast, instead he’s building a reliable short game over thirty years.

The Queen of Cups is probably my favourite card in the whole deck. It isn’t entirely free from The Winding’s underlying melancholy, but this scene feels inhabited rather than abandoned: nobody has noticed that Spidey has joined the nursery mobile yet… except perhaps the baby! Or so I like to think. I love the idea of our tiny spider dangling among the stars and adding to the visual wonder of the mobile for a pair of newborn eyes.

There’s something wonderfully simple and timeless about mobiles: gentle movement, little shapes turning in the light, something soothing and familiar that can nevertheless seem completely magical when you’re seeing the world for the first time. Mobiles have been around for ages, and yet they persist, still in a very simple form. Comfort, care, wonder and a little bit of everyday magic – it feels incredibly Queen of Cups.

Overall, The Winding has really surprised me. It’s undeniably cute but even this old cynic was charmed by it (my journey with Spidey reminds me of Rosa in Brooklyn Nine-Nine – “I’ve only had [puppy] for a day and a half, but if anything happened to him, I would kill everyone in this room and then myself“). There’s a melancholy strangeness and quiet sense of absence running through Oehlers’ artwork that stops it ever tipping into twee for me. I love the tiny scale of the journey, the traces of human lives everywhere without the humans themselves, and the way familiar Tarot symbolism has been translated into this enormous, slightly uncanny world of teacups, walking boots, memorial benches, old tills and nursery mobiles. Most of all, though, I love the deck’s central invitation to look again: at spiders, at the ordinary objects around us, at the things we instinctively recoil from or overlook, and perhaps at ourselves too. It’s gentle without being saccharine, whimsical without losing its bite, and much more emotionally complex than I expected.

You can buy The Winding directly from Three Trees Tarot here for £47.75.

*Though this was based on me having avidly read the books as a kid – I definitely remember there being peril, but them also being pretty cosy. A quick Google shows me the kids’ cartoon adaptation was, however, hardcore, and featured baby mice being impaled on a thorn bush by a shrike (butcher bird) and bleeding out in front of their devastated parents. Jeez. So I might have to revisit my metaphors going forward, lol.

.

.

.

.

.