Black and grey realism tattoo of the Cheshire Cat grinning on a branch, placed on the upper chest near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cheshire Cat on the upper chest

Realism · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a striped cat with a wide, toothy grin lying along a branch, with its long tail curling down past the edge of the design. The linework is fine and the fur is built up with detailed shading and hatching, with soft grey shadows around the figure. The piece is done entirely in black and grey ink and sits on the upper chest near the shoulder.

Realism Chest Cheshire cat Cat Branch Tree Grin Stripe

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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

You were hired to count the apples in the high orchard of Orrin's Reach, and nobody mentioned that the orchard had a tenant. By the third afternoon you had stopped expecting the tally to add up. The cat lay along the lowest bough as if it had been poured there, its tail hanging past the edge of the wood like a dropped ribbon, and its grin arrived a moment before the rest of it. "Are they sweet," it asked, "or only counted?" You told it the truth, which was that you had not tasted one, and it laughed so hard that a patch of the orchard went to smoke and hatching and did not come back.

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The Steward of the Reach summoned you to the court of grey stone the following morning and demanded the ledger. You opened it before him. Every page was blank except for a single line in your own hand that read, *the apples are being shaded*. The Steward turned purple, then thoughtful, then oddly quiet, because a voice from the rafters asked him whether he had ever once counted his own courtiers. Nobody could say where the voice was coming from. Nobody could say which of the courtiers was still solid, either, since the grin kept appearing on different faces along the back benches, each one slightly more pleased with itself than the last.

They let you go by evening, mostly because the Steward could not remember why he had wanted you kept. You walked home through lanes where the hedges had lost their edges and the fields were drawn in fine crossed lines, soft grey at the margins. In your room you lit the lamp and opened the ledger to write the day's figure, and the pen would not move. The paper was clean. The only mark on it was a curve of teeth hanging in the air above the page, patient, waiting for you to ask the next question.