The Eight of Coins is the eighth card of the earth suit, and its picture is unusual among the numbered pentacles for having no wealth, exchange or ownership in it at all: a craftsman at a bench, chiseling coin after coin and hanging the finished pieces to dry.
In the Tarot de Marseille the card is, as with every numbered pip in that pattern, eight identical coins set in a decorative lattice with no figure and no scene; a cartomancer reading it would work from number and suit alone, using manuals such as Etteilla's rather than any picture. Pamela Colman Smith's fully staged version, made for A. E. Waite in 1909, has no clear model in the Sola Busca deck, the one surviving fifteenth-century pack with illustrated pips usually credited as her main precedent; historians of the deck generally read the coin scenes, including this one, as her own invention, closer to the trade imagery of Edwardian book illustration than to any older tarot source.
The Golden Dawn's Book T assigns the small cards to the decans of the zodiac in a fixed sequence following each suit's element: Pentacles run through Capricorn, Taurus and Virgo, the three earth signs, three cards to a sign. The Eight, Nine and Ten of Coins cover the three decans of Virgo in the Chaldean planetary order the system uses throughout, and the Eight itself falls under the Sun, giving the card its Golden Dawn title Prudence.
The Thoth deck, painted by Frieda Harris to Crowley's specification, keeps the title Prudence and abandons the genre scene entirely, rendering the eight coins as a repeating geometric lattice worked in the deck's Golden Dawn colour scales, an abstraction consistent with Harris's general treatment of the small cards as diagrams of force rather than illustrations of people.