The Ring is card number 25 of the Petit Lenormand, the thirty-six card deck read in the nineteenth-century French cartomantic tradition that took its name, after her death in 1843, from the Parisian fortune-teller Marie Anne Lenormand.
Image, meaning and playing card
The card shows a ring. In the tradition its core sense is commitment, agreement, contracts and partnership; bonds that bind, whether a marriage or a business tie.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the Ace of Clubs, a survival of the ordinary piquet pack over which the pictorial Lenormand was laid. Lenormand cards are read less as standing symbols than in combination, each modifying the cards to either side, so that the ring takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.
In the original German tradition the card is Der Ring. As House 25 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on contracts, formal agreements and binding commitments of any kind, not only marriage. In combination, Ring followed by Man or Woman reads as a marriage proposal or formal partnership with a specific person, while Ring preceding Mountain reads as a blocked or delayed commitment, an example the overview of Lenormand's combination method already cites. The card's circular, unbroken shape is conventionally read as marking the binding, ongoing quality of whatever commitment is indicated.