Pencil drawing of a Cheshire Cat style grin and whiskered face with blue-green eyes, above the words we're all mad here, with no body placement shown.

Cheshire Cat grin with blue-green eyes

Mixed · Flash

A pencil sketch of a wide, toothy Cheshire Cat grin with whiskers and a pair of large, shaded eyes, the irises filled with blue-green colour. The phrase we're all mad here is written in capitals beneath the grin, with small x marks on either side. The linework and shading are in black and grey on pale paper, and the composition is centred and simple.

Cheshire cat Grin Eye Whiskers Text Lettering

Find an artist for this

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

You learn the fair's rhythm before you learn its rides. The wagons are drawn up behind the big top at Hollin Meadow, and the man who runs the coconut shy is called Mr Pilling, who has never once told you his first name. You are sixteen, sweeping sawdust for a shilling a day and a plate of chips.

Keep reading

On the last night of the season, the painter's booth opens for the first time since spring. Inside, a cat hangs from a hook, its grin stretched across canvas the width of a door. Pilling says the grin came first and the cat after. You stand on an upturned crate to see the eyes, which are blue-green like the bottle glass that catches the lamplight on the midway, and you realise they are looking at you, not the room.

"Everyone who pays to see this booth wants to know which of them is mad," Pilling says, dipping a brush in black. "I tell them the truth. We're all mad here. It's the only honest sign on the ground." He draws two small crosses either side of the words, like kisses at the foot of a letter, then hands you the brush and asks which side of the grin you would start on.

You do not know. You put the brush down. By morning the wagons are gone and the meadow is flat and grey, and in your coat pocket there is a scrap of paper with a grin on it, drawn so carefully that on the bus home it seems to be laughing at the driver.