Why a Hand-Drawn Tarot Deck Matters:
Behind the Art, the Artist, and the Ritual
The Quiet Difference You Can Feel
You’ve held beautiful tarot decks before — maybe even many.
But there’s something different, almost like a quiet recognition, when you hold a deck that someone truly created by hand. You can feel it before you even shuffle.
The weight is different. The energy is residing on another level of peace.
It doesn’t feel produced — it feels made to exist.
The Artist Behind the Ink
When I began drawing my first deck, The Wandering Moon Tarot, I wasn’t thinking about sales, print runs, or social media algorithms. I was just trying to stay alive in a body that had forgotten how to keep up with the world. A body, that I felt at times, had betrayed me and left me behind.
So I drew. Pen and paper. Dot by dot, line by line. Drawn to scale on tarot card-sized stock (fancy word for paper).
Each card became a conversation between what I could hold and what I had to release. Finding a balance while still conveying each cards meaning.
That process — slow, imperfect, human — is what still lives in every card I make. The energy of the artist can’t help but be imprinted on the cards and the words in the guidebook. That energy is still felt by the decks users even today, despite their being close to 20 print runs and thousands of copies sold.
Keeping the deck true to itself allows it to retain its original energy and its exact frequency.
Hand-drawn decks carry human memory. They aren’t data; they’re intention.
What Hand-Drawn Really Means
In a world of templates and AI illustration, it’s easy to forget what drawing actually demands: stillness, patience, and a willingness to sit in silence long enough for an image to arrive.
When a deck is drawn this way, something subtle happens.
The art doesn’t depict meaning — it embodies it.
The card isn’t a picture of intuition. It is intuition, caught in ink.
That is why every line, curve, and stipple matters.
Because someone bought it to life from nothing.
Why This Matters in Your Practice
A hand-drawn deck invites you to slow down too.
To remember that your readings aren’t performances; they’re a connection. A shared, lived experience.
When you pull a card from a deck created by hand, you meet another human across that time and space moment — someone who has already sat in the shadow, the light, the uncertainty you’re now reading through.
You’re not just reading symbols.
You’re holding someone’s survival, translated into art.
That’s a sacred exchange of energies
How to Recognise a Deck with a Soul
When choosing a deck, look for:
- Human imperfection. The kind that can’t be polished away.
- Depth of story. Was it drawn through lived experience or designed for trend?
- Energy that lingers. If the art stays with you after you close the box, trust that.
The right deck won’t just read for you. It will read with you.
The Ritual of Holding Art
When you shuffle a hand-drawn deck under candlelight, foil edges catching the glow, there’s a recognition that this — all of it — was made with care.
The tactile, the visual, the energetic.
It becomes a ritual just to touch it.
This is where art stops being object and becomes oracle.
If You Know, You Know
Not every reader will feel the pull of hand-drawn art. And that’s perfectly okay. The differences, the variety of decks, is what makes divination and those who practice it so wonderfully complex and beautifully simple all at the same time.
But if you’re still here, you probably do.
That deep, wordless sense of this feels real.
It’s how you know the deck is calling you, not just being marketed to you.
Always in your corner,
Rachael | MoonHaus Studio
🌙A Gentle Invitation
If this story resonates — if your body softened a little while reading it — you might like to meet The Midnight Sky Tarot Deck.
It’s the deck that grew out of everything I just shared: drawn by hand & made to walk beside you — not ahead of you.
✨ You don’t need to rush, compare, or collect.
When it’s time for a deck like this, you’ll know.