Our story
I never wanted a deck that told me what would happen. I wanted one that told me who I already was.
Witch Veil started with a deck nobody wanted.
Elowen Marsh was nineteen and clearing out her grandmother’s flat when she found it at the back of a drawer, wrapped in a square of black silk that had gone grey at the folds. Seventy-eight cards, printed some time in the forties, the gilt worn off every edge. Her grandmother had never once mentioned it. The family agreed it should go in the charity box. Elowen put it in her coat pocket instead.
She was training as a bookbinder at the time, which mostly meant learning how other people’s work falls apart. Spines that crack. Gold leaf that lifts. Ink that sits on a surface instead of going into it. She spent four years with her hands in glue and board, and the whole time that deck stayed on the shelf above her bench.
She was not, she will tell you, a person who read cards. She pulled one most mornings the way other people open a window. And the one that kept turning up was The Moon: the two dogs, the pool, the long road going nowhere you can see. The card about walking on when the light is bad.
“The cards I kept coming back to were never the pretty ones. They were the ones that told the truth. That is the one you want on you, not in a drawer.”
Elowen Marsh, founderThe idea was small and slightly stupid: if a card means that much, why is it sitting in a box? So she drew The Moon again, at the size of a bag panel, and had it printed onto vegan leather to see what would happen. The first one was bad. The ink sat on top like a sticker and peeled at the corner within a month.
It took the better part of a year to find a surface with enough grain for UV ink to cure down into rather than onto, and a maker willing to run one bag at a time instead of five hundred. That is still how every piece is made. Nothing sits in a warehouse. You order a card, and then it gets made.
The four editions came later, and by accident. Elowen had drawn The High Priestess as a flat Art Nouveau tarot card and it was fine, and it was not right. So she drew her again as a page from a medieval Book of Hours, in gold leaf and lapis. Then as a Victorian engraving, all cross-hatching and cold pen. Then as a Pre-Raphaelite painting, heavy velvet and moonlight.
Four drawings of one woman, and every one of them true in a different way. It seemed dishonest to pick. So the deck was built that way instead: twenty cards, each drawn four times, in four house styles. Eighty drawings for a deck that will eventually hold seventy-eight.
She is still drawing it.
What we hold to
One card, one piece. A drawing is never tiled or repeated to fill a panel. Each piece gets a single continuous reading of the card, which is why a tote and a mini wallet of the same design do not look like the same file stretched two ways.
Made after you order it. Five to seven days to print and sew. It is slower than pulling a box off a shelf, and it is the only way to offer eighty drawings across five forms without burning a warehouse of unsold stock.
Vegan, and honest about it. It is not hide and we will not pretend it is. It is a plant-based coated fabric chosen because it takes print better than leather does, it is lighter, and it does not crack in the sun.
No card is for everyone. We would rather you carried the one that is actually yours than the one that photographs best. That is the whole business.