The Ace of Batons or Wands is a single large club, held in a hand in most patterns, and for most of the tarot's history that is all it was: the one card of a suit, in a game where suit cards ranked in order and carried no pictures.
That is the crucial fact about the minor arcana. In the fifteenth-century decks and in every standard printed pattern for four centuries after, the numbered cards are pips, arrangements of the suit sign, exactly like the numbered cards in an ordinary modern deck. They have no scenes. There is nothing to interpret in a picture, because there is no picture.
The fully illustrated minor arcana that most readers now take for granted is the work of Pamela Colman Smith in 1909. She had one significant precedent, the Sola Busca deck of the 1490s, an unusual Italian pack with illustrated pips, photographs of which had reached the British Museum shortly before she began; several of her compositions resemble its cards closely enough that the borrowing is generally accepted. Beyond that she was inventing.
For this suit the occult layer assigns fire and the will, and the Golden Dawn treated the Aces as the roots of the powers of the elements rather than as cards with ordinary meanings. In practice the Ace of Wands reads as an impulse that has not yet been acted on: energy, initiative, the beginning of an enterprise, an idea with heat in it. Its failure mode is the same energy dissipated, enthusiasm that never becomes a plan, or a start made so often that starting has become the activity.