Black ink tattoo of a grinning Cheshire Cat with stripes on the side of an ankle, in a sepia-toned photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cheshire Cat on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A grinning cat with pointed ears and a wide toothy smile, with its striped tail curling around the side of the ankle. The design uses bold solid black shapes and sharp linework, with the stripes filling the tail and the lower body. The sepia-toned photograph has a dark background and soft lighting on the skin, with the tattoo placed near the top of the foot.

Ankle Cheshire cat Cat Grin Stripe Tail

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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

Now sit close, the lot of you, and mind the lamp, because this is a winter story and it wants a low light. It happened at Cold Harbour Farm the winter the Lowther brook froze solid enough to take a cart. There were nine barn cats on that place, and Mrs Hebden counted them every night at the byre door, same as her mother had before her, tapping each one on the head with one finger. Nine cats, nine taps, then supper.

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Then came the January the snow lay so long the hens stopped laying out of pure sulk, and a cat turned up in the hayloft that nobody had let in. Striped like a fire-poker, grey and black, with a tail that went on and on like a bell rope. It didn't mew. It sat on the cross-beam and grinned down at the lot of them, a wide, toothy, pleased sort of grin, as though it knew a joke about the farmer that he hadn't yet heard.

Mrs Hebden tapped the cats that night, as always, and came to nine, then tapped again in the dark and came to ten. She didn't care for that. Next morning the cat was gone, and so was the second-best ladder. But when the thaw came and she went to scrape the soot off the barn door, there on the timber, plain as a dropped glove, was the grin, with the tail curling round the latch. The grin stayed through three coats of limewash. It is still there, if you go and look, though the farm's been sold twice and the new people think it's just the wood.

So when you're out in the yard tonight and a striped thing blinks at you from the gatepost, don't count it. Just wave. It likes to be waved at, and it always knows more than you about where the milk went.