07 / Card size & template
Tarot Card Size and the Print Template
A finished tarot card is 70 × 120 mm (2.76 × 4.72 in), exact. The artwork you actually design is bigger: a 74 × 124 mm (2.91 × 4.88 in) canvas, with a 2 mm bleed band around every edge and a 4 mm safe area inside the trim. At 300 DPI that canvas works out to roughly 873 × 1464 pixels — a number almost nobody publishes next to the millimetres, because almost nobody prints the finished card and the working canvas on the same page.
This guide gives you both numbers together, the compact format too, and the free template that already has the bleed and safe area marked, so you are not the one doing this arithmetic by hand.
The numbers a template rarely puts together
Finished size.
Working canvas.
- 70 × 120 mm
- Finished card, exact
2.76 × 4.72 in - 74 × 124 mm
- Artwork canvas
2 mm bleed every side - 4 mm
- Safe area inside trim
62 × 112 mm inner box - ~873 × 1464 px
- The canvas at 300 DPI
computed, not a market figure
The pixel figure is our own conversion of the published millimetre canvas at 300 DPI, so you can work in Canva, Procreate or Photoshop without doing the maths yourself. It is not a claim that any competitor publishes it — the point is that we do.
What size should tarot card artwork be?
| Format | Finished size (exact) | Artwork canvas | Bleed | Safe area | Canvas at 300 DPI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard tarot | 70 × 120 mm (2.76 × 4.72 in) | 74 × 124 mm (2.91 × 4.88 in) | 2 mm (0.079 in) | 62 × 112 mm (2.44 × 4.41 in) | ~873 × 1464 px |
| Compact card | 50 × 90 mm (1.97 × 3.54 in) | 54 × 94 mm (2.13 × 3.70 in) | 2 mm (0.079 in) | 42 × 82 mm (1.65 × 3.23 in) | ~638 × 1110 px |
A card printed at any other finished size adds 4 mm to both finished dimensions to build its own canvas and safe area — the same 2 mm bleed, 4 mm safe-area rule applies. Pixel figures are rounded and computed at 300 DPI from the millimetre canvas; treat mm and inches as the source of truth for print, pixels as the guide for on-screen design tools.
What size is the working canvas for tarot card artwork?
Not the finished card size — that is the mistake almost every first-time deck design makes. The canvas you design on has to be bigger than the card that comes off the press, because printing trims the sheet and a design that stops exactly at the edge leaves a thin white line wherever the cut drifts by a fraction of a millimetre.
For a standard tarot card, the working canvas is 74 × 124 mm (2.91 × 4.88 in) — 2 mm of bleed added to every side of the 70 × 120 mm finished card. Background colour, illustration and any edge-to-edge pattern needs to run all the way to the canvas edge, not stop at the trim line. Text and any detail you cannot afford to lose sits inside the 4 mm safe area, a 62 × 112 mm (2.44 × 4.41 in) box centred inside the trim.
Most sites that answer "tarot card size" quote only the finished dimension — commonly rounded to 2.75 × 4.75 in — and stop there. That number is fine for a reader deciding whether a deck will fit a box; it is not enough to hand a printer, because it says nothing about bleed or safe area. The canvas, the bleed and the safe area are three separate numbers and a template needs all three.
What shape and proportions does a typical tarot card have?
Portrait, taller than it is wide, at roughly a 1.7:1 height-to-width ratio — that is the shape almost every commercial tarot deck has shared for over a century, and it is why a tarot card reads instantly as a tarot card even before you see the artwork. Dark Forest prints it at 70 × 120 mm exact, the same finished size used across the wholesale catalogue and every custom print run.
A second, smaller format exists for decks that favour portability over presence: a compact card at 50 × 90 mm finished on a 54 × 94 mm canvas, with a 42 × 82 mm safe area. The proportions are close to the standard card, so artwork composed for one does not simply scale into the other — a compact deck is its own design pass, not a shrunk copy.
Rounded corners are common across the market — usually a 3–5 mm radius, to stop the pack fraying at square corners during shuffling — but corner treatment is a die-cutting choice layered on top of the canvas, not a change to the canvas size itself.
Can I design and print my own tarot cards?
Yes, and the size question is the first thing to settle, before a single illustration is finished. Decide standard or compact, download the matching canvas, and build every one of your 78 illustrations on it from the start — resizing finished art after the fact is where safe-area text gets clipped and background patterns stop lining up at the bleed edge.
A full deck is a clean 156-page PDF: pages 1–78 are the card fronts at the canvas size above, pages 79–156 are the corresponding backs, and the back artwork is one design repeated identically on all 78 back pages. From a finished, print-ready file, Dark Forest prints from 12 decks per design, in multiples of 12 up to 192 — the lowest minimum among the real offset tarot printers we have read.
Where can I download a tarot card print template?
On the file guide and templates page — the clean production files, at the exact canvas sizes above, with the bleed and safe area already marked, free to download. That is where the actual template files live; this guide explains the numbers behind them so you know what you are looking at before you open one.
Template pages exist elsewhere on the open web — Etsy listings, Pinterest boards, free-design sites — and several rank well for this exact search. Reading them alongside our own kit, the pattern repeats: most publish either a finished card size or a canvas size, rarely both, and none we found ties the millimetre canvas to a pixel figure at a stated DPI the way the table above does. A template without a stated bleed is a guess about where the printer will cut.
Can I design my own tarot cards online for free?
Yes. Canva, Procreate and Photoshop all work — the free part is the software, not a shortcut around the geometry. Import the matching clean template at its original size, add editor-only guides 6 mm in from each flat canvas edge so you can see the safe area while you work, and design at full resolution rather than a screen preview.
When you export, save as PDF Print at 1:1 scale with your working guides hidden, then reopen the exported file and check three things before you send it anywhere: the canvas dimensions match the template exactly, the page count is 156, and the pages are in the right order — fronts first, backs second, in matching sequence. A file that looks right on screen and is 2 mm short on one edge is a bleed problem you will not see until proof.
Where can I find free printable tarot card sheets?
Worth answering honestly, because two different things share this search. If you want cards to read from — printable sheets for your own practice, no production run involved — that is a different page: our own reading printables and card-meaning guide. If you want the production files to send to a printer — the canvas, bleed, dielines and the 156-page structure this guide describes — that is the specification and template page. A blank practice printable and a print-ready production template solve different problems, and confusing them is the single most common reason a first print order comes back with the wrong file structure.
From template to an approved print run
Once your 156-page file matches the canvas, page count and page order above, the size decision is done — the rest is the box and the booklet, covered in the box and booklet guide, and the full order sequence in the self-publishing checklist. You pay through checkout first, and production only begins once you have approved the exact artwork.
Prefer not to design 78 cards at all? Put your brand on an existing 78-card design instead, and skip the template entirely.