Among the four Rider-Waite-Smith knights, the Knight of Cups is given the slowest and calmest horse, walking rather than galloping across a shallow stream, in keeping with the deck's general practice of matching each knight's pace to his suit's element: Wands rides hardest, Swords charges, Cups ambles, and Pentacles, as the earth suit, barely moves at all. Pamela Colman Smith adds a winged helm and winged heels, an unusual pairing more often associated with Mercury than with water, generally read as marking imagination and swift feeling rather than swift action.
No equivalent scene exists in the Tarot de Marseille, whose Cavalier de Coupe, like all four Marseille knights, is a static heraldic horseman holding the suit emblem with no gesture of offering and no narrative content at all. The offered cup itself, held out toward the viewer rather than raised in the seated Queen's private posture, is usually read as the compositional key to the whole card: this knight's feeling is not held but extended, a token given before it has necessarily been asked for.
In Crowley and Harris's Thoth deck, within their Knight, Queen, Prince, Princess court structure, the equivalent figure remains named Knight of Cups and appears mounted, carrying a cup or grail-like vessel, broadly consistent with Smith's imagery though rendered in Harris's more abstract, projective style rather than as a narrative genre scene.