Considerate Cat Tarot
A 78-card indie tarot deck built on the Rider-Waite-Smith structure, illustrated end to end with cats — most of them real rescue cats, drawn from photographs and carrying their own documented stories. Over 150 illustrations across the deck. The artist, Madeleine Belanger, is a Vancouver illustrator and cat foster coordinator; the deck began as a crowdfunded project in 2018 and has stayed in print through multiple printings since.
What you get
- 78-card deck: 22 Major Arcana, 56 Minor Arcana
- Suits: Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles
- Court ranks are renamed to feline equivalents rather than Page / Knight / Queen / King
- Included guidebook — a pocket-sized book rather than a folded LWB, with card meanings and the stories of the cats pictured
- Shipping weight: 0.68 lbs
- Ready to read out of the box; no assembly, no missing components
About the deck
The structure is Rider-Waite-Smith. Minor Arcana are fully illustrated scenes, not pip cards, so if you learned on a RWS-family deck the visual cues you already read will carry over. The artwork itself doesn't imitate any existing deck. It's a personal illustration style, soft-lined and domestic, heavy on nature and interior scenes.
Tone matters here more than usual. This is a gentle deck. Belanger describes her own tarot practice as closer to journaling or meditative yoga than to prediction, and even the traditionally hard cards are drawn with a light hand.
Provenance and cause
Printed independently by the artist rather than by a major publisher, which is why the print run details and card stock differ from mass-market decks. Five percent of the proceeds from each deck go to V.O.K.R.A. (Vancouver Orphan Kitten Rescue Association), a no-kill, entirely volunteer-run rescue. The cats in the cards are largely rescue alumni.
Who this is for
Daily-draw and journaling practices. Beginners who want RWS scenes without RWS severity. Readers building a gentle deck alongside a heavier working deck. Gratitude, reflection, and grief-adjacent work where a harsh deck gets left in the box. Cat people generally, and cat people who read tarot specifically — an easy gift for either.
