Full colour neo-traditional Alice in Wonderland sleeve covering the forearm and upper arm, with the Cheshire Cat, playing cards, roses and a green hedge maze.

Alice in Wonderland arm sleeve

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A full arm sleeve shows a scene from Alice in Wonderland, including the Cheshire Cat grinning from a tree branch, a girl in a grey dress near the wrist, and playing cards on a path. Roses, mushrooms, leaves and yellow flowers fill the gaps, with a green hedge maze at the top of the arm. Bold dark outlines and saturated colour dominate, with a checkered floor pattern running through the composition.

Neo-trad Forearm Upper arm Alice in wonderland Cheshire cat Alice Playing card Rose Mushroom Flower Leaves Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pell had been painting the same Queen of Hearts for thirty-one years, and on the Tuesday the letter came from Bramley Hall she put down her brush and read it twice with her spectacles on the end of her nose. The Honourable Mr Coyle wanted a sixteen-card set for his estate, every suit hand-coloured, the backs in green, and a Knave who would not look like the Knave in the shops. "Make him a man who has been caught at something," the letter said, "and is not sorry."

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She worked through October at the scullery table in Hackney, with the window open because the turpentine made her cough. The hearts came out red as a pillar box, the clubs a black so deep the paper seemed to swallow the light. Each evening a girl from the next street, Lily Ferris, came round to hold the lamp steady, and each evening Lily asked why the Knave had a fistful of tarts and the sky behind him was the wrong colour for a sky.

Ada never answered. She painted a checkered path along the bottom of every card, purple and cream, because her own mother had laid one like it in a sheep farm kitchen, and a path that goes nowhere is the only honest path for a card. On the last night she sealed the box, and the Knave's face, which she had meant to make cross, came out grinning like a man who had found the door in the hedge.

Mr Coyle sent the set back a week later, unpaid, with a single line in pencil: the Knave is laughing at me. Ada looked at it for a long time, then put the kettle on and laughed too, so loudly that Lily came running round from the next street to see what had gone wrong.