Black ink tattoo of a Cheshire cat grin and striped tail on the back of a neck, in a bold blackwork style.

Cheshire cat grin and tail on the neck

Blackwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind of a black ink tattoo on the back of a neck, showing a cat's grinning face with narrow eyes and pointed ears, with a striped tail curling down to the right. The lines are bold and the solid black shapes are cleanly filled, with the tail built from separated black segments. The image is taken at a slight angle with dark hair covering the top of the frame and a plain background.

Blackwork Neck Cheshire cat Cat Grin Tail Stripe

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the lamp, it's the last of the paraffin. Now, the Tidewell signal gantry was no place for a cat, everyone knew that, which is exactly why the cat chose it. Folk on the Medway wharves swore the grin came first, hanging in the fog like a crescent moon that had got itself into trouble, and only after the grin did the rest of the creature bother to follow.

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Maud Pellow kept the north light that winter, when the mists came off the estuary thick enough to swallow a barge whole. She didn't believe in grins. She believed in brass and tide tables and the ledger she kept with her tally marks. So when the grin hung over the mudflats one night and asked her, very politely, where the channel had gone, she told it the channel was exactly where it had always been, and that it could fetch its own bearings.

The cat laughed at that, a sound like a rope paying out, and said she could have the channel back if she could tell it what remained when the cat was gone. Maud thought about it while the lamp guttered. Then she understood. The fishermen had never followed the cat. They had followed the grin, the one bright line they could see through the murk, and she had been trimming it dim for years to save oil. She lit the lamp full and turned the glass until the grin burned gold on the water.

By morning the tail had dropped away in pieces, one black segment at a time, sinking into the silt where the channel bent. Each piece had settled upright like a stake, and the tide ran between them clean as a schoolroom ruler. Maud still keeps the ledger. Beside the last entry she drew a small grin, and beneath it, in her careful hand, the single word: follow.