Full colour neo-trad Alice in Wonderland sleeve on a woman's upper arm and forearm, with playing cards, a rose and a Cheshire cat.

Alice in Wonderland sleeve with playing cards

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The sleeve shows a blonde Alice character in a teal dress and red and white striped stockings, surrounded by playing cards with hearts, clubs and spades. Below her, a grinning orange Cheshire cat and a red rose sit against dark blue and purple clouds on the lower arm. Bold black outlines and saturated colour give the design a bright, graphic look as it wraps from the upper arm down towards the wrist.

Neo-trad Upper arm Forearm Alice Alice in wonderland Playing card Cheshire cat Rose Pin-up Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cards went over the side on the third night out of Valparaiso, one at a time, because Mr Pell said a man ought to lose his luck in good order and not all in a heap. Ace of hearts first. Then the queen, which he swore was the one dealt to him in Liverpool forty years before. We were the only four awake on the middle watch, and the ship's cat sat on the rail watching the wake with the particular smugness of an animal that has never been asked to account for anything.

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The cat had come aboard at Tilbury in a sea chest marked for a Mrs Alice Hardcastle, who did not exist, according to the purser. It grinned at the bosun. It grinned at the cook. When the Bay of Biscay turned us inside out it grinned at the sea, and the sea, having no sense of humour, went on heaving us about regardless. Pell said the cat was a sign. The cook said it was a stowaway with good teeth.

Somewhere off the Horn the glass fell so fast the officers stopped reading it aloud. We battened the hatches and sang the old sorting song to keep time, and Pell kept laying cards on the deck as if the wind were a dealer who had to be answered. Forty-one cards by morning. The last was a rose-red jack, face up, pinned under the flat of a boot. Nobody could say who had put it there.

When we raised the Falklands the sky cleared to a cold blue that hurt the eyes. Pell was gone from his bunk. In the sea chest, folded neatly, lay a teal dress and a pair of striped stockings, and the cat was asleep on top of them. I took the cards to the captain, who said we would log them as lost overboard, which was true enough. I still keep one. It is the queen of hearts, and she is smiling at me as if she knows the way home.