Colour tattoo of the Cheshire Cat's grinning face with green eyes and teal stripes, in neo-traditional style on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cheshire Cat grin on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a grinning cat face with pointed pink-tipped ears, green eyes with vertical pupils, a pink nose and a wide row of white teeth. Soft shading and bold outlines define the grey fur, and teal strokes and fur tufts frame the head. Bright greens, teals and pinks dominate against the bare skin, and the design fills most of the frame.

Neo-trad Upper arm Cheshire cat Cat Grin Teeth Green eye Whiskers

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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 band is playing the last waltz and the floor is still thick with couples who don't want to go home, when you notice the grin hanging above the bandstand. It drifts in the haze of cigarette smoke like a moon that has got its priorities wrong. Nobody else looks up. First the teeth, row upon row of them, then the eyes, green as bottle glass, then the ears, pink at the tips as though they've been dipped in the Mersey.

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You ask Ada, who has poured gin at the end of the bar since before the war, whether she can see it. She doesn't turn round. She says the cat only shows itself to people who have been counting the wrong number of dances, and slides you a glass you never ordered.

Your partner has gone to the cloakroom and not come back, or perhaps never existed; you can't recall the name you were laughing at ten minutes ago. The grin widens. Under the floorboards a clock stopped in 1931 begins to tick, and the saxophonist starts a tune with no ending, the sort that loops back to its first bar and tries again.

So you do what the cat seems to want. You walk the length of the floor, past women in green sequins and sailors with their caps tipped low, asking each couple politely if they've seen their own way out. Nobody answers. At the far door a wedge of moonlight lies across the boards, and the grin is pinned to the frame, waiting to see whether you'll laugh. You do. The door swings open onto wet cobbles and a dawn you had forgotten you owed, and the cat goes out first, as cats do.