Deck Review: The Yukika Tarot

The Yukika Tarot is the latest creation from illustrator and storyteller Stasia Burrington, also known for her Sasurabito Tarot (which I use a lot and REALLY need to get round to reviewing one of these days 😬) and for illustrating numerous children’s books. I read a lot of kids books to the Tarotcupcakes, and I can see the lineage here. The Yukika Tarot has that gentle-yet-terrifying quality children’s stories do so well: soft, comforting, almost whimsical on the surface, but hinting at deeper, grittier truths, and not afraid of darkness.

Because in my experience kids HATE stories that are too de-fanged, that patronise them and act like they don’t know there is sometimes pain, suffering, evil, disappointment in the world, as well as candyfloss and unicorns. And though this is a super warm and cosy deck (that colour palette! it’s like a hug by the fireside. It’s gezellig. It’s hygge), it respects the shadows too.

The childlike elements don’t mean this deck is for children, though, far from it! Burrington was awarded the title “Master of Erotic Art” by the Foundation for Sex Positive Culture, and this is, in many ways, a deeply sensual – and profoundly embodied – deck. Burrington likes bodies. She paints them with loving tenderness. All bodies: old bodies, fat bodies, scarred bodies, broken bodies. They are handled with warmth and care, never sensationalised, never shamed. I read a blog post from Burrington where she writes “I am obsessed with skin – it’s this weird complex ugly beautiful bag which contains and separates ‘us’ from everything else… I am interested in this artificial outline with which we separate ourselves from an imaginary exterior: this outline which separates person – from flower – from insect – from star – from me – and from you.”

This is not a deck pretending the world is fine, it knows we are living through strange, frightening, apocalyptic-feeling times. And yet Burrington describes the deck as “meant to be a healing potion. A fat, juicy, fortifying elixir to fortify your heart and bring you back into a safe, grounded body, in times of apocalypse.” Yep, I’d agree! This deck doesn’t bypass trauma, rather, it metabolises it, it takes the rot and turns it into nourishment. It brings you back into the body, back into warmth, back into something steady and human, not by denying the darkness, but by digesting it.

When small, I liked to make “Magic Machines.” Generally built around a tunnel, toilet paper tubes joined together. Taped elaborate additions to the tube, with cardboard and coloured paper. The structure became larger and more intricate. At the end, gravity would carry a marble or small toy through the magical portal.

Emerging apparently the same, I imagined the travellers transformed, having gone through something, imagining magic as invisible.

And I imagined magic in moving from one place to another, in weathering a storm. In being somehow changed, as appearing the same. A precious secret.

In a different form, this deck is another Magic Machine. Changes invisible, I invite you to enter this portal.

Stasia Burrington

The Deck: Look, Feel, and Finish

The Yukika Tarot follows the familiar RWS structure, but with plenty of unique tweaks and changes. There are 80 cards in total: the usual 78, plus two additional cards, Wild and Wonder, which feel less like gimmicky add-ons and more like organic outgrowths of the deck’s spirit. As Burrington puts it, “I have diverged, renamed and reframed some cards to suit myself, a messy and fluid Japanese-American artist in 2025.”

The artworks come from original ink and watercolour paintings, rendered in soft, fluid washes that bleed and bloom across the page. The effect is gentle but intentional, nothing here feels rigid or overworked. It’s structured, yes, but it’s breathing. Burrington draws explicitly on the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi – valuing imperfection, impermanence, and incompletion – and her love of raw, degradable materials comes through even in the printed form. There’s a sensuality to her relationship with paper, brush, ink; a reverence for things that age, soften, and shift over time.

The deck comes housed in a sturdy, hard-lidded box with beautiful pink holographic foil detailing on both the packaging and the card backs, as well as the card edges. Now, as regular readers will know, I am not usually the biggest fan of glitz for glitz’s sake (or of glit edging on decks!), but this all really works here. The sharpness of the metallic sheen against the deck’s soft, fluid, almost delicate aesthetic creates a tension I genuinely love. It’s that contrast again: something tender and feminine shot through with something bright, almost electric.

Inside, there’s a short, paperback guidebook written by Burrington herself. It’s quirky, intimate, and very much focused on building a relationship with this deck, rather than teaching Tarot 101. You won’t find generic RWS keyword lists here; what you get is Burrington’s take: personal and reflective, rooted in her own symbolic language.

The Yukika is, in many ways, a happy deck – and fittingly so, as Yukika can be read as “happy flower” in Japanese. But this isn’t a saccharine happiness, it’s the kind that knows what it costs. Burrington herself describes her intent with her art as creating something “bittersweet” – work that recognises sadness as necessary, as inseparable from joy: “I want people to connect to the work, have an emotional reaction to it – an appreciation for the sensuality of the subject matter. I want to remind the viewer of their own imperfections, their own mortality… [but also] their own beauty.”

Greatest Hits: My Favourite Cards from the Yukika Tarot

“The mountains weather, and hold,” Burrington writes of the Empress (Matrix) in the guidebook, a line that captures the quiet steadiness of her version of this card. The traditional symbolism is all here, but refracted through the ordinary rather than the regal: stars appear not on a crown but on steaming mug of comforting tea; fruit decorates her casual day dress; vines curl across her skin like living tattoos. It’s the Empress translated out of myth and into the everyday. I love this, because it emphasises what I see as a key message of this card – noticing the small pleasures that quietly sustain us. The warm drink, the soft fabric, the slow ripening of fruit, the feeling of being alive in a body that is part of the natural world rather than separate from it. It calls to mind Khalil Gibran’s lovely line: “Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the wind longs to play with your hair.”

Burrington speaks directly to this idea in an interview I read. “It’s so seductive and actually easy to find delight and excitement in the exotic and the novel,” she reflects. “But the fact is that most of the time we are in our daily routine, and maybe it’s not the most glamorous. We think that if things were different, then maybe we could be happy. But that’s a problem of attention.” Her interest, she says, lies in the here and now, in feeling “simple” pleasures more deeply. This Empress understands that. She isn’t promising some distant abundance that will arrive once the conditions are perfect, instead she’s reminding you that you have much to enjoy right here in this moment.

In Burrington’s deck, the Emperor becomes The Ward, and while I’m normally pretty ambivalent about changing Tarot card titles (I firmly believe that archetypes have stood the test of time for a reason, and that we shouldn’t mess with them too much) I do like how this reframes the card. In the guidebook she writes: “The Ward shows up. The Ward is no coward; he stands up for and protects others. Stands up for and protects himself. He bears the marks of struggle, of experience. He is no stranger to suffering… [but] he is fuelled by affection and hope.”

This is not the distant, marble-throned patriarch that so many Emperors become. Instead we’re given a battle-scarred body that tells its own story: bandaged hands, marks of past struggles written plainly across the skin. And yet there is something unexpectedly gentle about him; for all his obvious physical strength, his expression is warm, even kind. The eyes are soft. He looks like someone who has fought hard, but who has not allowed that fighting to harden him. I like this reinterpretation a lot. The Ward still embodies protection, endurance, and responsibility, the traditional backbone of the Emperor archetype, but Burrington grounds those qualities in lived experience rather than distant authority. Strength here isn’t austere or intimidating, it’s protective, almost affectionate.

Personally, I’ve always thought it healthier to gather guidance from a whole constellation of teachers, elders, books, and traditions rather than blindly adhering to just one. After all, whereas a single story can become dogma, a chorus of stories becomes culture. Plus it mirrors a) my weird little magpie brain and b) the Tarot itself, which pulls from a wide range of traditions and histories.

When I look at the artwork I can see a tenderness running through all these characters, but it isn’t weakness. These are survivors. The Hierophant in paricular has the energy of the sweet, reassuring old lady who makes you tea and listens to your woes, while also possessing decades of life experience and precisely zero tolerance for bullshit!

So, the next tranche of cards – the Lovers, Temperance, and the Hermit (here renamed the Wanderer) – all draw on a visual motif that recurs throughout the deck: figures rendered through these rudimentary, almost skeletal lines. It’s a simple technique, but a viscerally powerful one. At various moments the lines remind me of nerves or blood vessels – that which lies beneath the skin – cave paintings, and fossils. They’re very primal and very evocative, they feel ancient, elemental, almost archaeological – as though Burrington is sketching not just bodies, but the deep structures that underlie them.

This style is particularly effective in the Lovers card, with what looks like two figures with their nerve endings or blood vessels all flowing into each other, or their skeletons entwined. This immediately made me think of the famous Lovers of Valdaro, a pair of 6,000-year-old human skeletons discovered in a Neolithic tomb near Mantua, Italy, in 2007. The two individuals were buried face-to-face, arms wrapped around each other in what looks uncannily like an embrace – even in death they appear to be holding on to each other for dear life.

As I said before, I’m generally a big fan of Tarot archetypes; I believe they are so culturally resonant for a reason, and when decks wander too far from them something essential can be lost. But I also love it when an artist manages to pull on a different archetypal thread, something that feels new and yet strangely familiar. That’s exactly how this card landed for me. When I first saw it, I had that uncanny feeling of recognition: I know this card. And I kinda do… but I also kinda don’t. It feels ancient, bone-deep, it speaks directly to something primal in the Lovers archetype while still feeling fresh. It’s a real testament to Burrington’s knowledge of the Tarot and her skill as an artist that she is able to tap into the very lifeblood of Tarot in such a new and fresh way.

And the presence of those skeletal forms adds another layer to the card’s meaning, one that’s very much present in the original RWS’s imagery with its visuals of Adam and Eve standing by the apple-laden Tree of Knowledge. Because arguably the most important thing the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge gave Adam and Eve was not simply awareness/shame (oh shit! We’re naked! lol), but the knowledge of their (our!) own mortality: the knowledge of death. The existential philosopher Martin Heidegger believed that knowing death, that confronting it head-on, is necessary if we want to live authentically: knowing that we will die frees us from the illusion of endless time and forces us to confront what truly matters. Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker made a similar argument in The Denial of Death, observing that much of human behaviour, particularly our frantic accumulation of wealth and status, stems from our attempts to outrun mortality.

But Tarot understands something that philosophy often circles around: it is precisely because life is finite that our choices matter. To eat from the Tree of Knowledge is to realise that we will die, and being cast out of Eden before reaching and eating from the Tree of Life (which would’ve given us immortality) means we must live with that knowledge. In Tarot, the Lovers card is not just about romance or attraction, then, it is about choice. It is about choosing a path, choosing a person, choosing a life – knowing full well that none of it lasts forever. Rabbi Dan Moskovitz once asked a beautiful question about the Eden story: where is the true paradise? In the garden where no one dies and time stretches endlessly? Or east of Eden, where every moment is precious precisely because it is finite? Burrington’s Lovers seem to understand the answer. These figures are already bones, already fossils, already echoes in the earth – and yet they are still holding each other, still choosing each other.

In Temperance, these same skeletal figures appear, but this time I definitely feel they are nerves and blood, the hidden architecture beneath the skin. The blue figure resembles the branching delicacy of the nervous system; the red one the intricate web of blood vessels that keep the body alive. Side by side they look like two vital systems of the human body, each distinct, each necessary. Which makes this a rather perfect image for Temperance, which isn’t really about moderation in the bland, self-denying sense the word sometimes suggests, but rather modulation, or even regulation. It’s not about dampening our power or becoming smaller, safer versions of ourselves, it’s about adjustment, calibration, being alive to the world and our role within it. Or as Burrington writes in the guidebook, to be “slow and gentle, mindful, to make a custard without splitting.”

The card has always had an alchemical quality to it (it is, after all, named ‘Alchemy’ in the Thoth), the mixing of substances, the pouring from one vessel into another, but Burrington’s image brings that process directly into the body itself – nerves and blood, sensation and vitality, thought and impulse. Different systems working in tension and harmony. Or, as the wonderful Jen Cownie and Fiona Lensvelt put it, Temperance speaks to “the ability to gracefully blend different or opposing forces into something new and far superior… skill or practice that requires you to expertly control volatile and often conflicting elements.” That’s exactly what the body does every second of every day. It balances electrical signals and chemical reactions, instinct and cognition, survival and sensation. Temperance, in this sense, is less about restraint than about integration – the quiet, constant work of bringing disparate forces into alignment so that life can flow through us. And Burrington captures that beautifully. The body here is not a fixed form but a network: branching, pulsing, endlessly communicating within itself, almost fungal in its structure, recalling Burrington’s fascination with mycelial networks threading through the soil beneath our feet.

In the Wanderer* (Burrington’s reinterpretation of the Hermit) that same linear-type figure appears again, but this time it reads differently. To me it resembles a cave painting, or a fossil pressed into stone, something ancient, primal, almost archaeological. High above the forest canopy, it glides across the night sky like a constellation come loose. The journey across the heavens is one of humanity’s oldest stories – long before roads and maps, we looked to the stars to orient ourselves. To travel, to wander, to wonder!

This card joins a tradition of Hermit cards that show the Hermit on the move. He’s rarely hiding away in his cave. Rather, he’s out wandering, searching, shining his lantern into dark and forgotten places. Jessica Dore describes this as a metaphor for being at peace with life’s flux: “changing and being stuck, expanding and contracting, evolving and devolving.” Similarly, the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot writes on the Hermit: “It is the heart which is simultaneously active and contemplative, untiringly and unceasingly. It walks. It walks day and night, and we listen day and night to the steps of its incessant walking. This is why if we want to represent a man who lives the law of the heart… we present him as walking, steadily and without haste.”

Burrington writes in the guidebook that the Wanderer asks us “to be curious, to invite a radical turn of the kaleidoscope.” And while it’s become a bit of a cliché that travel (e.g. backpacking!) can help us ‘find ourselves’, it is true that seeing different places and peoples can shift how we see the world. And that ancient quality in the imagery reinforces the idea that this journey is far bigger than any individual traveller: the path from birth to death is as old as humanity itself. Every one of us walks it. We move forward, searching for meaning, for direction, for destination.

Burrington’s Justice card is one of the strangest and most unsettling in the deck; whenever I look at it a weird feeling of dread settles in my belly. In some ways I like it the least, lol, it’s a bit out of step with the general lightwork vibes of the deck. But I picked it as a favourite because it’s powerful, even if it makes me feel uncomfortable. In Burrington’s card a lone giant figure stands before a vast crowd, two skulls in the foreground, while the heads of the onlookers blur unsettlingly between living faces and bare bone. It makes me think of Eliot’s lines on Webster, “[he] saw the skull beneath the skin.” Beneath status, identity, and power, we are all fundamentally the same fragile creatures. Justice, in this sense, becomes a great leveller.

There’s also something about the scene that feels like witnessing: a tribunal, perhaps, or the aftermath of a battle or massacre. The crowd watches as the towering figure confronts them, and the presence of all the skulls/possible-skulls is perhaps the dead, or history itself watching, the weight of all the consequences that came before. Justice here is not tidy courtroom fairness but something older and more primal: a reckoning that none of us can escape. The card reminds us that Justice isn’t always comforting, it often arrives when something must be confronted. And here everyone in the card is watching. No one is turning away. Burrington writes “to lose innocence is to have the suffering of the world thrust upon you, to see, to Witness. To hold responsible and to account.”

The Hanged Man (Suspension) card plays on the traditional theme of Hanged-Man-as-chrysalis very effectively. The figure hangs cocooned beneath a branch of delicate cherry blossom, poised in that strange, fertile state of in-between. Kinda almost like a seed pod, maybe, waiting to drop and germinate. Sometimes the only thing to do is hang there a while, gathering the strength to flower.

A beautiful Ace of Wands, which captures the care and attention you need to give a tiny spark if you want it to grow into a roaring fire. Something so powerful and seemingly unstoppable starts off so small and vulnerable – just like all our dreams and ideas and creative impulses. Easily snuffed out if neglected, but capable of becoming something extraordinary if given the right conditions. “Feed yourself, give yourself space and air and attention,” Burrington advises.

The Ten of Wands shows a much less tender image, a shadowy figure ablaze. Burrington reminds us “you’re not fuel, but a tender, alive creature.” When this card comes up in a reading it can be about the danger of burn-out, about not sacrificing your wellbeing to keep a dream alive.

BUT, I also kept hearing that opening line from the Stars song Your Ex-Lover Is Dead, “when there is nothing left to burn you have to set yourself on fire”. Much like the Ten of Wands, it’s a line that can sound bleak, even destructive, but it can def also be read another way. Sometimes, when you have exhausted every external resource to achieve something, then the only path forward is to offer yourself. To dedicate yourself wholly to realize your goal. The Yukika Tarot’s card seems to hover in that uncomfortable space between those two truths. Burn-out and devotion can look dangerously similar from some angles. And history has seen acts of devotion that look almost unconscionable from the outside – when I first saw this card I couldn’t help thinking of the famous photograph of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức, who sat perfectly still in meditation as flames engulfed him, in protest against injustice. Fire can consume us. But it can also be something we choose to allow to consume us, in a final act of passion and devotion to a cause.

This is a really sweet little Seven of Cups, and I love the way Burrington reframes the card’s energy. Instead of the usual warning about illusion, procrastination, and getting lost in daydreams, the image leans more toward possibility. The feeling here isn’t confusion so much as openness – the future not yet decided, the landscape still unfolding. Burrington captures this beautifully in the guidebook, describing the card as an invitation “to recognise the future as uncertain, and full of potential.”

A really interesting take on the Three of Swords. It’s easy to default to reading this card purely as heartbreak, but it’s worth remembering that Swords belong to the realm of the mind, not the heart (hello Cups!) Sometimes this card speaks less about emotional devastation and more about the painful conflict that can arise when our thoughts and feelings pull in opposite directions.

Burrington’s imagery captures that sense of being psychologically pinned in place. In the guidebook she describes it as “stuck, held back, tethered to stories stitching you to those who’ve hurt you.” It’s a powerful image of what Limberger calls “analysis paralysis” – where we get too caught up in reflecting on old hurts to move on with our lives. The swords here are not just weapons but narratives: the stories we tell ourselves about pain, betrayal, and what it all meant. And sometimes the hardest part of healing is simply loosening their grip.

What I find really clever about Burrington’s Seven of Swords is the ambiguity of the silhouette. At first glance it looks like someone slinking off with an armful of stolen swords, classic Seven-of-Swords trickery. But you can’t really tell, the blades could just as easily be piercing the figure’s body. Sometimes when we act in bad faith, cutting corners, telling half-truths, convincing ourselves we’re getting away with something, the person we end up wounding most is ourselves. The snake below seems to underline the point: deception has a way of slithering back around. In the end, the difference between wielding the swords and being wounded by them might be smaller than we’d like to think.

I love the paper aeroplanes here, they’re such a perfect visual for the Page of Swords. Made from paper, with its links to ideas, words, and messages (all very Swordsy!), they capture that sense of light, experimental flight: playful, curious, but also a little unpredictable. So the Page riding a paper areoplane is a lovely metaphor for ideas being launched into the world, testing how far they travel and what they might hit. Burrington describes the card in the guidebook as “moving forward and learning on the fly — by doing. By aspiring, by being brave with heart aimed towards adventure.” It’s very storybooky too, especially with the dragons wheeling through the sky. You can clearly see Burrington’s background in illustrating children’s books coming through here (more on that later!), giving the card a sense of imaginative daring, the mind taking its first exhilarating flights.

This card in particular, but several others from the Yukika Tarot, remind me of Andrea Gibson’s amazing poem, For The Days When I Stop Wanting A Body, written in the context of their long and exhausting battle with Lyme Disease. Writing about it, John Hidas notes that instead of falling back on the familiar idea of the soul transcending the body, Gibson does something far more radical: they imagine the opposite – “the soul lost and grieving without the body that has served it so nobly.” The poem becomes a kind of love letter to embodiment, honouring the strange, fragile details that make up a life lived in flesh: the terror of reading aloud in class, the jolt of banging your funny bone, the irritation of a loose tooth, the wrinkles that form “the smile’s autograph.” As Hidas puts it, Gibson gathers together these “tiny odes to the simple preciousness” of bodily experience – sex, hunger, rage, illness, exhaustion, joy – all the messy, imperfect textures of being alive. The poem includes the fierce command: “Erase every scripture that doesn’t have a pulse“, and that feels very much in the spirit of Burrington’s Pentacles. Like the seed sprouting quietly underground, the suit of Pents in this deck feels deeply invested in the body as our first and most essential ground for growth – not something to transcend, but something to tend, nourish, and inhabit with care.

When a human dies the soul moves through the universe
Trying to describe how a body trembles when it’s lost
Softens when it’s safe
How a wound would heal given nothing but time

Do you understand
Nothing in space can imagine it
No comet
No nebula
No ray of light can fathom the landscape of awe
The heat of shame
The fingertips pulling the first grey hair
And throwing it away
“I can’t imagine it.”
The stars say
“Tell us again about goosebumps.
Tell us again about pain.”

From ‘For The Days When I Stop Wanting A Body’ by Andrea Gibson

You can also listen to Gibson read the whole thing here (they were an amazing performer – RIP):

The Five of Pents shows a figure sat “alone in a bottom of a pit. Out of steam. Tired from digging. Or was it a fall? Tired from struggling.” And yet the walls of the pit glitter with quartz crystals, treasure embedded in the very place that feels like failure. As Burrington starkly puts it, it is “a treasure-studded pit. Hunger.”

Now, this is one of the cards where Burrington’s background as a children’s book illustrator really shines through, as her card is surely a nod to the brilliant picture book Sam and Dave Dig a Hole by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen. In the story, two brothers, Sam and Dave, set out with their dog to dig a hole in search of something “spectacular.” Determined, they proclaim: “We won’t stop digging until we find something spectacular.” And so they dig… and dig… and dig. Along the way, the illustrations show them repeatedly missing enormous diamonds buried in the earth around them, sometimes by only inches. The treasures are always visible to the reader (and to their dog), but never to the boys themselves. Klassen plays cleverly with visual perspective: the positioning of the characters’ eyes reveals who is aware of the hidden riches and who isn’t. Eventually Sam and Dave return home* from their excavation exhausted, hungry, and apparently empty-handed, convinced their search has failed. But of course the reader knows something different. They have been surrounded by treasure the entire time – they simply couldn’t see it.

That idea resonates beautifully with Burrington’s Five of Pentacles. The traditional meaning of the card often centres on hardship, scarcity, or feeling abandoned by fortune. But Burrington’s image complicates that story slightly; even at the bottom of the pit, surrounded by exhaustion and hunger, the walls glitter with possibility. The question is not only how we escape the hole, but whether we are able to recognise the value that might already be present within it.

*The ending of Sam and Dave Dig a Hole contains one final, delicious ambiguity – when the emerge from their pit there’s some subtle differences in how their home and yard look, implying they’re not actually home, but have dug into another dimension, an alternate reality, or that their adventure has changed them somehow, so the world looks a little different to them now. This brings me full circle to the quote I cited from Burrington’s guidebook at the beginning of the review. As a child she used to build little “magic machines” from toilet paper tubes, sending marbles through elaborate tunnels and imagining them travelling through some unseen transformation. At the end the marble would emerge looking exactly the same, but she imagined the traveller had changed in some invisible way: “emerging apparently the same, I imagined the travellers transformed, having gone through something… imagining magic as invisible. And I imagined magic in moving from one place to another, in weathering a storm. In being somehow changed, as appearing the same. A precious secret.”

It feels like the perfect metaphor not just for Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, but for the Five of Pentacles itself. Sometimes we emerge from hardship looking outwardly unchanged, if a little bedraggled. But something subtle has shifted beneath the surface: we have ‘been through it’, we have learned something – and that’s the treasure.

The Yukika Tarot is def a deck that rewards slow looking. At first glance its soft watercolours and gentle imagery feel almost delicate, but the longer you sit with the cards the more you realise how much is happening beneath the surface. Again and again Burrington returns to images of growth, transformation, and invisible processes, to her childhood “magic machines,” those elaborate toilet-paper-tube tunnels through which marbles would travel before emerging apparently unchanged. But in her imagination the traveller had been transformed by the journey, even if the change was invisible. That feels like the philosophy running through the Yukika Tarot. The cards remind us that transformation doesn’t happen overnight, it happens slowly: underground, in the dark, in the small accumulations of experience that shape us over time.

We pass through the tunnel, we weather the storm, and we emerge looking almost the same – but carrying, somewhere inside us, a precious secret.

You can buy the Yukika Tarot from the creator’s Etsy for $60, and it’s also available via UK stocklists like Little Red Tarot or Tarot By Peachy for £45.

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* I’ll admit I initially clocked this as the Chariot, lol. Perhaps a reminder of why I don’t always love archetypes changing their names. But probably a reminder that I am an idiot, haha. Mea culpa.)