Black ink tattoo of the Cheshire Cat's wide grin and striped tail on an ankle, shown in a sepia-toned photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cheshire Cat tattoo on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black tattoo of the Cheshire Cat, showing its toothy grin, triangular eyes and ears, and a curled striped tail that wraps around the ankle. The bold black linework has simple, flat fills with no shading. The sepia-toned photograph sits against a dark background, with the skin of the ankle filling most of the frame.

Ankle Cheshire cat Cat Grin Tail Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, the lot of you, before you fall over the chairs. The Harvest Hall at Lower Drayton had a floor that hummed when the band was good, and the band was never good, so you can imagine how the floor sounded that autumn. Then Walter Finch came in off the lane with mud to his knees and asked the fiddler for a waltz that nobody had ever danced to, and the fiddler, who was a sour man called Alf Penrose, said the only waltz he knew was in the key of cats.

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Walter didn't laugh. He looked up, and there on the lid of the piano was a grin with no cat under it, all teeth and two slanting eyes, pleased as you like. Alf dropped his bow. When it finally spoke, the cat had thought better of the fiddle and wanted the floor. Its striped tail came curling down off the piano and wrapped the leg of every chair in the room, so that the whole hall swayed like a gate on a loose hinge. Dorothy Quill, who had danced with nobody since the war, put her hand out to Walter without a word, and off they went around the room in a slow, crooked circle, every stripe of that tail a bar of the tune.

They danced until the lamps guttered and the clock struck twelve, and then the cat was gone. Nothing was left on the piano but a smear of paw-print dust. Walter looked down at his palm and found a fine black stripe drawn across it, neat as a pen line, and it never came off.

Dorothy married him the spring after, which is the only part of this story anyone's ever had to check. The grin is still up over the hall door, if you know where to look. Mind the third board from the stage. It's warm, that one, and it hums.