Colour tattoo of a grinning cat with glowing teal eyes and swirling blue smoke on a calf, in a realistic style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grinning cheshire cat on a calf

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A large cat head with a wide toothy grin, glowing teal eyes and a pink nose sits at the centre, with grey and lilac fur shading. Blue and teal swirling wisps rise above the head and trail below the chin, framed against a black background. Soft gradients and fine whisker lines give the portrait a painterly, realistic finish.

Realism Neo-trad Calf Cat Cheshire cat Smile Teeth Eye Swirl Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on Tanner Street would rent the back room once the tabby had gone, so Ada Pimm took it on, paying the first quarter in pennies she had saved for a winter hat. The landlady, Mrs Greaves, swore the cat had never belonged to anyone, only passed through the house the way weather does. It slept on the bread bin and walked the mantel at night, and whenever a lodger told a lie in its hearing, it simply stopped being in the room.

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Ada didn't credit a word of it until the third night. She woke to the smell of wet slate and saw, above the washstand, a grin with no body beneath it. Teeth came first, then two eyes the colour of gaslight through green glass, then a crown of curling vapour rising through the damp plaster like a kettle's breath. "You owe me a truth," it said, or she thought it said, in the voice of someone reading aloud from a book they had not finished.

She had lied once, years before, about a brother who went under the ice on the Cam, and she told it now, shaking, every part of it. The grin widened until the room seemed to fold itself around the mouth. Then the wisps unwound from the ceiling, slipped under the door, drifted down the stairs past Mrs Greaves's snoring, and went out into the fog over the gasworks.

In the morning there was a fine blue ash on the washstand, curled like a question mark. Ada swept it into a biscuit tin and kept it on the sill. Mrs Greaves said the cat would come back when someone was ready to be laughed at. Ada wasn't sure about that. But the grin stayed painted on the glass for weeks, tilted at her each morning, and she found she could not lie to it, not even about the hat.