Another one of the most striking and ominous cards in the deck, the Ten of Swords shows a man lying flat on the ground with his face facing the dirt. He is covered with a red cloth from the chest down to his legs. Ten long swords are stabbed into his back, he may not have seen this end coming. There is a terrible stillness in the air: the sky above him is black and cloudy indicating the fear and negativity associated with death. The waters in front of him are still, with no ripples - adding to the eerie stillness and finality of this card. Looking into the horizon, in the east, the sun is rising, and the weather seems very calm despite the darkness. The Ten of Swords seems to intimate that this is the lowest point in one's life, and it cannot get worse than this. At least, even in this state, the sun is rising.

The Ten of Swords indicate a major disaster of some sort. It shows that a certain force of extreme magnitude has come to hit you in your life - one that you may have not foreseen. There is a sense of betrayal that is indicated here, for the character is stabbed in the back. This seems to be a reminder that despite how much we try, we cannot control everything - there are things that are beyond our ability to change. Here, this situation is unavoidable.

The tale of the suit of swords is a powerful metaphor, one that ends in tragedy. The swords are a symbol of the intellect, of intelligence and logic, and yet we find the final culmination of this suit a complete and total defeat of the spirit. We must realize that the swords are a weapon that can have immense potential for destruction or for good. The story as it unfolds from the ace to the ten is one where an untrained individual uses this weapon for faulty reasons - makes many mistakes, and then spends an entire lifetime attempting to run away from the power that he misused.