What does Seven of Swords mean for career and work?

Somebody taking credit, a colleague operating in bad faith, or a strategy that depends on not being seen.

The credit-taking version is the most common and the most demoralising, and it usually cannot be addressed directly without appearing to be the problem.

The practical reading is to make your contribution documented rather than deducible, which is unromantic and works. Where the card describes your own strategy, its caveat stands: this may fail.

Deception, cunning, acting alone. Somebody is not being straight.

Check whether it is you. That instruction is the card's whole contribution, because the reflex on drawing it is to look outward and the reflex is wrong about half the time.

It also covers legitimate strategy: knowing what to leave behind, moving without announcing it, choosing not to fight something head on. Not everything done quietly is done dishonestly.

Deception exposed, or a confession. Returning what was taken.

The confession reading is the good one and is frequently a relief to the person making it. Concealment is expensive to maintain, and the reversal is often somebody putting the weight down.

Sometimes getting away with it, and having to live with that, which the tradition treats as the worse outcome of the two and rarely gets read that way.

Upright: deception, cunning, strategy, acting alone, evasion

Reversed: exposure, confession, returning, getting away with it

• What am I not saying, and why?
• What am I taking that was not offered?