Black and grey realism style tattoo sleeve on an upper arm showing Alice holding a DRINK ME bottle above a black and white checkerboard, with more tattoo work on the forearm of the other arm.

Alice and checkerboard sleeve on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a woman in a long dress holding a bottle labelled DRINK ME, drawn in a detailed engraved style with fine shading. Below her, a black and white checkerboard pattern runs down the arm, with dark, textured shading filling the lower part of the sleeve. The image is a close crop of the upper body and arms, with the tattoo as the main focus and a soft, pale background.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Alice Bottle Sleeve Dress

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the kingdom of Lessary the fields were laid out in black and white squares, so the queen could see every hedge from her tower and tell her steward which ones had grown too tall. Nobody living remembered who had drawn the lines. When Mabry Holt was eleven, the miller sent her up the hill with a stone jar of cold tea and a message that it must reach the queen before the noon bell, and that she must never stop on a square of the wrong colour.

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Halfway up the road she found a glass bottle lying in the ditch, its paper label soft with rain. Someone had written DRINK ME across it in careful capitals. Her grandmother had told her never to drink anything that asked her to, and Mabry knew this, but the sun was high and the jar was heavy and the bottle seemed to want nothing more than to be useful. She drank. The world sank away from her like a tide going out. By the time the bell began she was no taller than the gatepost, and the guards looked straight through her, because the queen's men only counted what stood above the wall.

Inside the tower the queen sat at a table marked as a board, playing against herself with carved ivory pieces. She did not look up. "You are late, and small," she said. "Where is my tea?" Mabry held up the jar, which had shrunk with her and was now the size of a thimble. "Then you will be the messenger," the queen said, and she set Mabry on a black square at the edge of the board. Mabry looked along the rows of pieces and understood, slowly, what kind of game this was and who would be taken off it at the end.

There was a second bottle in her apron pocket, which she did not remember picking up. It bore the same label. She thought of her grandmother, and then of the steward counting hedges below the window. She drank. The board rose beneath her until she could see over the rooks and down the hill. She stepped off, grew back to her own height, and walked down with the empty jar under her arm. Behind her, in every field she had crossed, the squares had faded to the colour of ash, and the queen, for the first time in years, could not tell where one hedge ended and the next began.