Dark ink tattoo of a grinning Cheshire Cat with one blue-filled eye and the words 'we're all mad here' trailing into a dotted tail, on the ankle.

Cheshire Cat grin and 'we're all mad here' on ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a grinning Cheshire Cat face with pointed ears and one eye filled with blue, beside the words 'we're all mad here' in hand-drawn lettering that ends in a row of dotted strokes forming a tail. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with a sketchy, hand-inked quality, and the blue appears only in the eye. The tattoo sits on the side of the ankle against a pale fabric background, with the photo cropped closely around the skin.

Lettering Ankle Cheshire cat Cat face Grin Lettering Quote Tail Ear

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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

Somewhere south of the Cape the fresh water went green in the casks, and you were the one sent down with the lantern to count them. The cat was already there, sitting on the lid of the third cask as if it had paid for its passage. Its grin came and went in the lamplight, wider than any cat's mouth ought to stretch, and when you asked the bosun about it he only laughed and said half the watch had been talking to it since Madeira.

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For eleven days the wind hung dead and the men went strange. Old Tobias swore the sea was climbing the hull at night. The cook counted his biscuits three times and got three different sums. You kept the log because you wrote a fair hand, and every evening you copied the day's entries in careful ink, and every evening the cat sat on the binnacle and watched your pen as though it were taking notes too. Once you looked up and the grin was all that remained on the rail, hanging in the dusk like a crescent moon.

On the twelfth morning the captain called you aft and showed you the log. Beneath your last entry, in a looping scrawl that leaned like a sail in a fresh breeze, someone had written: we're all mad here. Nobody on board admitted to the writing. The captain said it was the cat's doing and told you to keep your pen dry.

When the wind came back that afternoon, a long grey tail of spray curled off the bow, and the cat went with it, one dark dot after another across the wake, until the last of them sank under the swell. You never did find out which of you had been writing the log. The ink was still wet.