Realistic colour tattoo of the grinning Cheshire Cat curled in a tree on the upper thigh, with purple and teal striped fur and yellow eyes.

Cheshire Cat on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A purple and teal striped cat with yellow eyes and a wide grin curls around a tree trunk, with bare branches behind it. The fur is rendered with soft, detailed shading and highlights, and the background is a muted brown and olive wash that frames the cat within an oval. The tattoo sits on the outer thigh and fills most of the frame.

Realism Thigh Cheshire cat Cat Grin Tree Branches Fur

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Thornbury would say the cat had a name, only that it had come with the orchard, the way damp came with the stone. Ada Pell carried a basket of eggs up the lane every Thursday for the widow Grieve, and every Thursday the cat was there first, curled round the crooked ash by the wall, its stripes gone the colour of bruised plums in the low sun. It never came down. It only grinned, and the grin lingered in the branches after the rest of it had gone quiet, so Ada would look up and find the smile hanging there alone.

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The widow had given her the rule when she was small. Don't ask it the way home. Ask it nothing and it will tell you what you already know. Ada had never wanted anything from the cat, so the rule was easy to keep until the spring her brother Tom walked out along the Bramwell road with the carrier's money sewn into his coat and did not come back. The village searched for three days. On the fourth Thursday Ada climbed the lane with her eggs, stopped under the ash, and could not stop herself.

"Where's Tom?" she said.

The grin considered her for a long moment. Then one striped paw unfolded from the bark and pointed, quite politely, at the ruined castle on the ridge, its towers roofless against the sky. "Take the long way round," it said. "The short way is only for people who already know where they are going."

She found Tom on the broken stair of the keep, sorting the carrier's coins into neat rows on a stone step, and when he looked up his face wore the same wide, unhurried grin. It took her the whole walk home to coax him out of it. On the way down she glanced back at the ash, and the grin was still there, hung in the branches with nothing behind it, waiting for the next person who asked the wrong question.