Black and grey Mad Hatter illustration in a top hat, above a scrolled banner reading We're all Mad here, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Mad Hatter and banner on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A vintage-style illustration of the Mad Hatter in a tall top hat stands above a scrolled banner with the words "We're all Mad here" in script, flanked by leaves and small flowers. The linework is fine and detailed, with hatched shading on the hat, coat and foliage. The design is rendered only in black and grey on a pale wrist and forearm against a plain white background.

Forearm Top hat Banner Script Leaves Flower

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

Sit yourself down on that bench, love, and mind the snails, they've been at the foxgloves again. You want the one about old Silas Fenwick and his hedge of hats? Right. Silas made hats in the town of Little Wenning, tall silk ttops that gentlemen wore to funerals and then forgot they owned. Every spring he carried a crate of them out to the walled garden behind his shop, because the bees liked the black silk and the rooks liked the ribbons, and he'd leave them on the wall to air.

Keep reading

One March a stranger came to the gate with a banner rolled under his arm. He wanted a hatter to paint his words on silk, and the words were these: we're all mad here. Silas laughed and said the whole town could have told him that for free. The stranger did not laugh. He unrolled the banner across the wall, and the leaves on it began to curl at the edges, and the little flowers opened their petals one at a time, as though somebody was counting them.

Silas stitched that banner into the lining of his best top hat that night, so the words sat against his own head where he'd feel them every morning. By the next spring the garden had grown a hedge of tall hats along the wall, each with a leaf sprouting from its brim, and the rooks had moved into every one of them. Nobody in Little Wenning has ever agreed on who was the mad one. Pass me that trowel, would you. And mind the snails.