Colour realism tattoo of the Cheshire Cat grinning with blue stripes and wide blue eyes, with a blue caterpillar below it, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cheshire Cat and caterpillar on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large tattoo of the Cheshire Cat with a wide toothy grin, blue striped fur and bright blue eyes, set against a dark blue and purple smoky background. Below the cat, a blue caterpillar with red spots and soft green shading sits along the lower part of the limb. The shading is smooth and detailed, with strong highlights on the eyes and fur, and the colours are vivid against the skin.

Realism Forearm Cheshire cat Cat Smile Eye Smoke

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hull of the Tessellate Rose is groaning again, and the grin on the nav console has been fading in and out since the third jump. You tap the glass and it widens, teeth first, the way it always does when you are about to be wrong. "You're going round the wrong side of the moon, dear," says the ship, which has no mouth but has never needed one.

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Below the nav table, the old archive drone Pell rolls out of the cargo bay, trailing a thread of blue vapour from its vent. It predates the colony charter and talks like a man who has read every book twice and liked none of them. "Who are you, then?" it asks. The manifest says you were born on Station Gallow, which was lost to a fuel fire before you could remember its corridors, so you cannot answer with a name. "Whoever took the salvage contract," you say. Pell exhales a slow ring of smoke and says that is what a caterpillar says before it has decided what size to be.

You dial the tether to full and set the ship drifting towards the belt. Out there a wreck turns slowly on its axis, its airlock hanging open, and a drifting cloud of violet light paints the dust red where it crosses the sun. The grin follows you across the bulkhead plating as you approach, stretching wider than the glass can hold.

Inside the wreck, the logbook is still open at the last entry, written in your own handwriting and dated for tomorrow. You read it twice. Then the cat on the console begins to purr, and you understand that it was never guiding you home, only showing you which door you would choose to open from the inside.