The Stork is card number 17 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 stork. In the tradition its core sense is change, movement and relocation; from its folklore it can also mark a birth or the arrival of something new.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the Queen of Hearts, 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 stork takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.
In the original German tradition the card is Der Storch. As House 17 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on change and transition, a broader sense than the literal birth association the stork carries in wider European folklore, though that older association is part of why the bird was chosen for this position in the original Game of Hope. In combination, Stork followed by House reads as a house move or a change in domestic circumstances, while Stork preceding Woman reads as a significant change coming to or through a woman in the querent's life.