Three repeated views of a colour tattoo of the Cheshire Cat grinning from beneath a pink curled tail, on a lower leg, with a lightning bolt and a green dinosaur nearby.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cheshire Cat with pink spiral tail on a leg

Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows the grinning Cheshire Cat face with yellow eyes and purple fur, set at the base of a long pink curled tail that wraps up the skin in spiral bands. The image repeats the same tattoo three times side by side, and smaller tattoos of a yellow lightning bolt and a green dinosaur sit at the edges. The shading is smooth and soft with bright pink, purple, yellow and green ink.

Calf Cheshire cat Cat Tail Spiral Stripe Lightning bolt Dinosaur

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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 notice the cat before anyone else does. It has settled on the top table between the cake knife and a jug of wilting peonies, and it is grinning at the speeches the way a man grins at a bill he has no intention of paying. Nobody else seems to mind. Aunt Mags has her elbow in the trifle, the best man is reading messages off his phone under the tablecloth, and the string quartet keeps returning to the same bar because the cellist has lost her place.

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The tail belongs to Pip, or so the florist insists. Pip found a costume shop in Leamington that sold a pink satin tail on a wire, and wound it three times round the marquee pole for luck. Now the ribbon spirals down from the rafters in loose bands, curling past the fairy lights and dropping to the table, while the grin hangs above the cake with nothing much underneath it. In the photographs it shows up as a purple smudge with very sharp teeth.

You go to the gents' corridor to escape the noise, and the mirror has the grin in it too, sitting on the sink where the hand towels should be. It asks whether you have ever wanted anything at a wedding other than the buffet. You tell it the buffet is good, actually. It says the buffet is a lie the caterers tell to keep people sitting down. Then the power fails, the disco dies mid-chorus, and a child at the back starts wailing about the green plastic dinosaur balloon that has floated off into the car park.

In the dark the only light is the grin, glowing faintly where the fairy lights used to be. When the generator coughs back to life, the cat has gone, and the top table is only peonies and a knife. A pink curl of ribbon is looped twice round your wrist. Across the room the bride waves at you with her whole arm. "Dance with me before it unwinds," she shouts, and so you do.