The Ship is card number 3 of the Petit Lenormand, the thirty-six card deck read in the nineteenth-century French cartomantic tradition that took its name, after her death in 1843, from the Parisian fortune-teller Marie Anne Lenormand.
Image, meaning and playing card
The card shows a sailing ship on water. In the tradition its core sense is travel, distance, foreign matters and a longing for what lies far off; in trade questions it can mark commerce and the movement of goods.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the 10 of Spades, a survival of the ordinary piquet pack over which the pictorial Lenormand was laid. Lenormand cards are read less as standing symbols than in combination, each modifying the cards to either side, so that the ship takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.
In the original German tradition the card is Das Schiff. As House 3 in the fixed thirty-six-position Grand Tableau layout, any card falling in that numbered spot is read as touching on travel and distant matters regardless of which of the thirty-six cards it is, a separate technical layer from the card's own face-value meaning. In combination, Ship followed by Letter reads as news from abroad or travel documents, while Ship followed by Coffin reads as a journey that ends badly or a departure with no return; word order is significant throughout the system, the first card naming the subject and the second modifying it.