The image is more consistent than the numbering. In the French pattern La Force is a woman in a wide-brimmed hat closing or opening a lion's jaws with her hands, calmly and without apparent effort. Some earlier Italian versions show a male figure with a club, closer to Hercules and the Nemean lion, and the shift from a man with a weapon to a woman with her bare hands is the most interesting thing about the card's history. Whenever it happened, and it was well before the occultists, it changed the card from a picture of prowess into a picture of something harder to name.
The Golden Dawn assigned it the letter Teth, the sign Leo, and the nineteenth path from Chesed to Geburah. Teth is traditionally read as a serpent, and the coiling form of the letter is often connected to the lemniscate that Pamela Colman Smith drew above the woman's head in 1909. Crowley's version, retitled Lust, keeps Leo but reads the card as the joyful acceptance of appetite rather than its restraint, which is a substantial reinterpretation and a specifically Thelemic one.
Ordinary reading practice runs to courage, patience, self-mastery, and influence exercised without force, the persuading of a strong thing rather than the beating of it. The critical readings run to force disguised as gentleness, endurance carried past the point of sense, and appetite denied so long that it becomes the whole problem. Waite files those under reversal; many readers find them in the upright card when the spread is bleak.