Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Alice shrinking into a Drink Me bottle

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A black-outlined silhouette of Alice falls head first into a large bottle, with a pocket watch on a chain and a Drink Me tag hanging nearby. The background is filled with soft watercolour-style washes in purple, blue, pink and red, with red paint-like drips running down the lower part of the design. Colour ink dominates the composition, and the solid outline work keeps the figure and objects clearly defined.

Upper arm Alice Bottle Pocket watch Silhouette Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pellow kept the bottle shop at the bottom of Gaunt Lane, and she would not sell a single flask until the customer had told her what it was for. Most people lied. Hettie Marsh did not. She came in on a wet Thursday with her father's pocket watch in one hand and a sixpence in the other, and asked for something small enough to fit through the gap under the cellar door.

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"Small for what?" said Mrs Pellow.

"For my brother. He's gone under the floorboards again, and the cat won't fetch him."

Mrs Pellow took a green bottle from the back shelf, the one with a paper label gone soft at the corners, and wrote two words on a tag in brown ink. She tied it to the neck with string. Hettie read the words aloud slowly, the way children do, as if the letters might change their minds.

She drank the bottle that night, sitting on the cellar steps. It tasted of pennies and rain. Then she went down head first, the watch chain trailing behind her like a dropped ribbon. The cellar had turned into a night sky. Pear trees dripped red wine onto the flagstones, and a row of tiny men sat stitching the hems of the stars. Her brother was not among them. He was asleep in his own boot, a thimble-sized lump with cellar mould on one cheek, and she carried him up in her apron.

Mrs Pellow was waiting at the till with the sixpence in her palm. She bit it, frowned, and dropped it in the jar with the other counterfeits. On the back of the tag, in the same brown ink, someone had written the price: one brother, returned, unharmed, slightly smaller.