Cheshire Cat tattoo with a grinning face, blue and green splashes and quote lettering across the upper arm.

Cheshire Cat and quote on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo on the upper arm shows the Cheshire Cat's grinning face and striped tail with black linework and blue and green shading. Bold black lettering in several sizes runs beside and below the cat, and loose blue and green splashes spread across the skin. Colour ink is prominent alongside the black, and the framing crops the wearer so only the arm and shoulder are visible.

Lettering Upper arm Cheshire cat Cat Quote Splashes

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Abney never let me touch the gold until I could letter a straight line without my tongue poking out, so for two winters I mixed size and cleaned brushes while he painted the pub boards and shop fronts along Kemp Town. The cat came in on a Tuesday, pinned to a sheet of tracing paper by a woman who wanted it across the front of her late husband's chip shop. "He'd have hated it," she said, "so it has to be right."

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Abney traced the grin three times before he let any paint near the wall. A Cheshire grin, he told me, is the last thing to leave a room, so you lay the teeth in first and build the cat around them. The blue of the eyes came from a tin of ultramarine he kept in a biscuit box, cut with a drop of the green we used for the bowling club's gate. The tail went round the door frame like it had always been there.

The words ran down the side in three sizes, the big YOU a foot tall and the rest shrinking like a man backing away from a dog. I spaced the last line wrong and he made me rub it out with a rag and turpentine, twice. "Nobody reads the small bit," he said, "but they feel it."

The shop reopened in April. The sign was up a week before the woman came back alone, carrying a bag of fish she had not paid for. She stood under the grin for a long time with the gulls shouting overhead. "He'd have hated it," she said again, and then more quietly, "He'd have read every word." Abney is dead now. The cat is still up there, its gilt teeth going green in the sea air.