Colour tattoo of the Cheshire Cat grin with teal eyes and swirling smoke on a calf, in a neo-trad style.

Cheshire Cat tattoo on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows the Cheshire Cat's face, with a wide toothy grin, bright teal eyes and a pink nose, set above a dark purple-grey body that fades into blue wisps. Shading and fine whiskers give the face a painted, dimensional look, and curling teal smoke rises above the head and trails below the chin. The design sits on a lower leg against a plain black background, with the cat centred in the frame.

Neo-trad Calf Cheshire cat Cat Grin Teeth Eye Smoke Whiskers

Find an artist for this

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

Mr Pell's tobacconist on Sallow Street had a sign painted across the front window that nobody could read after dark, only the grin of the thing, done in the glass by a sign-writer who had gone to France and never come back. You went in on a Tuesday for a quarter ounce of shag and came out without it, because the old man behind the counter had a way of telling you the price had gone up, then down, and somehow you were holding a different packet and paying in coppers you did not remember finding.

Keep reading

Your sister called the place a swindle. You said nothing, because she had married the chemist's boy and believed she knew everything about swindles. That August the river dried to a brown thread, and teal smoke began leaking from the back room under the door, curling up the stairwell and over the bannisters as if it had been waiting all summer for a window. Mrs Pell said it was the boiler. The boiler had been cold since Easter.

On the last Saturday of the month you went up anyway. The room held a horsehair chair, a brass fender, and a cat on the mantelpiece, all shadow except its eyes, which burned green-blue like a gas ring. It did not move. It only opened its mouth wider, and the grin went on past the place where a cat's face should stop, and the smoke poured out and wrapped the chair legs, the fender, your ankles, and you understood that Mr Pell had never once sold anybody tobacco.

You came down the stairs slowly, counting the treads, and at the bottom he held out a packet. It was lighter than shag ought to be. When you opened it there was nothing inside but a thin curl of blue, and a voice very like your own said, politely, that you were looking a little peaky, and would you not like to stay for tea.