Colour tattoo of the Cheshire Cat's grin with blue eyes on the inner wrist, with the words we're all mad here written beneath.

Cheshire Cat grin with quote on a wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of a tattoo on the inner wrist, showing the Cheshire Cat's wide grin with teeth, blue-shaded eyes and a small pink nose. The cat's face is outlined in dark linework and shaded with soft tones, and the words we're all mad here sit in black script below it. The arm fills the frame against a shiny, crinkled grey backdrop.

Forearm Cheshire cat Cat Grin Eye Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Quill painted the cat on the shutter of the Penny Wheel the week the fair pitched on Ashby Common, and by the Thursday the stallholders had stopped calling it a cat. 'That's a grin with a cat tacked on,' said Dennis from the candyfloss van, and nobody argued, because the thing did seem to watch you walk the length of the midway.

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She had given it blue eyes, the exact blue of the enamel jug her gran kept for hop-picking tea, and a row of teeth she'd fussed over with a size-zero brush until her wrist ached. Every morning someone scrubbed at the corners with turps. Every morning the grin came back a little wider, as if the paint had been waiting for the rag to finish.

The fair manager wanted it gone before the Saturday crowds. Mabel said she'd repaint the board with a plain red circle if he could explain to the children why the wheel had no cat. He couldn't. So on the last night she sat on an upturned crate with a jam jar of water and a fine brush, and wrote underneath the grin, small and careful, the line she'd heard the old showmen mutter over their tea: we're all mad here.

They struck the fair at dawn, lorries grinding out past the cattle grid. When the shutter came down for the last time, the sun caught the blue eyes through a gap in the boards, and Dennis swore afterwards that the cat had winked at him as the wheel's hook clanked shut.