Black ink linework drawing of a neo-traditional tattoo design with a rose, pansy, top hat, pocket watch, teapot and ace of spades on white paper.

Mad hatter rose and ace of spades design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-inked black linework drawing of a tattoo design, shown on white paper beside playing cards, a glass bottle and a locket. The composition centres on a large rose and a pansy, with a top hat, pocket watch, teapot and ace of spades layered among scrollwork, leaves and beaded chains. The design uses fine hatching and stippled shading in black ink only, with no colour.

Neo-trad Botanical Rose Pansy Top hat Pocket watch Teapot Playing card Bead Clock Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock on the Hatter's waistcoat had stuck at ten to four for nineteen years, and nobody at Mrs Pettigrew's tea house thought to wind it, because the guests liked the hour. I was the girl who swept the crumbs and kept the card table dusted, which made me the only one who noticed when the ace of spades went missing from the deck.

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It turned up under the teapot on a Tuesday, the spade inked so black it looked wet. Beside it lay a pansy pressed flat between the pages of a seed catalogue, and a note in a hand I knew from the ledger: Pay the rose what she is owed. The rose was Miss Ashdown, who had come every Thursday since the spring to argue with the Hatter about sugar and to lose at patience.

I carried the card to the back parlour, where the Hatter sat with his top hat tipped over one eye, dealing himself a hand that never finished. He did not look up. 'Time is a debt, child,' he said, 'and the clock is only a ledger that forgot its sums.' I set the spade on the table between us. He turned it over and, for the first time in my memory, the face of it was blank.

I wound the pocket watch that night, though I was not supposed to. When the hands crept past ten to four, the tea house went quiet the way a garden does after frost, and every chair was empty except one, where the rose had been sitting all along, holding out her hand for her change.