The Seven of Swords completes the Aquarius decans in the air suit's zodiacal sequence, falling under the Moon and carrying the Golden Dawn title Unstable Effort, softened somewhat by Waite's picture and hardened again by the Thoth deck's blunter title, Futility.
Pamela Colman Smith's scene, a man tiptoeing from a military camp with five swords gathered under one arm and two left standing behind him, glancing back with an expression most commentators read as sly rather than fearful, is one of the deck's clearer instances of ambiguous morality rendered visually: nothing in the picture confirms whether he is stealing, retrieving what is his, or executing a legitimate but sneaky tactic. The Marseille pattern offers no such ambiguity to resolve, since its Seven of Swords is seven blades in a decorative lattice, read by older cartomancers from number and suit alone, without any narrative of theft or cunning attached.
The two swords left behind are frequently discussed by readers as the image's most interesting detail, since a simple thief would take all seven if he could; their omission is variously read as haste, a deliberate decision to leave evidence, or a limit on what one figure can physically carry, and the tradition has never settled on one answer. The Thoth deck keeps something of this instability in its title, Futility, rendering the seven swords as a jagged, unbalanced geometric arrangement under Harris's usual abstraction rather than depicting any figure at all.