Watercolour-style Cheshire Cat head with a wide grin and teal eyes, surrounded by purple and teal splashes, tattooed on a shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cheshire Cat on a shoulder blade

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A grinning Cheshire Cat head sits at the centre of the design, with teal eyes, a pink nose and dark stripes shaded in grey. Loose watercolour splashes in purple, teal, green and pink bleed out around the cat and drip downward. The tattoo is centred on the shoulder blade, with the cat's head as the clear focal point against the skin.

Shoulder Cheshire cat Cat Grin Watercolour Splash Eye

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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 keeper on Scarra Rock had a grey cat called Mab who came across with the lamp oil and never once asked for her supper. Each night she sat on the gallery rail while Tomas trimmed the wick, and each night the sea below went the colour of bruised plums and then of pond water, and she grinned at it as though it had told a joke she had heard before.

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The winter the fog stayed three weeks, the boats stopped coming in. Tomas's daughter Ilse, who was nine and had a paintbox from the mainland, sat at the kitchen table sponging blue and green onto scraps of card. She painted the cat's face from memory, the stripes and the teal eyes, and when the card ran out she painted the damp walls of the stairwell instead. Her mother scolded the mess. Mab only watched from the window ledge, grinning.

On the twenty-first night a trawler called the Margery Bell lost her bearings in the murk. Tomas climbed to the lamp and found the glass dark and the mantle cracked, with no oil to spare. Ilse came up behind him with her paintbox under her arm and said the sea would not care what the light looked like, only where the rocks were. So they hung a sheet of tin painted with the cat's grin in front of the beam, and the teeth threw a pale flare through the fog.

The Margery Bell came in by that grin, the skipper swore afterwards, and nobody on the mainland believed him. Mab was never seen again. Ilse still keeps the tin, and when the fog comes down she takes it out and lets it grin at the water.