Mad Hatter top hat above a lettered spade
Lettering · Mixed · Photo
A teal top hat with a purple band, a purple ribbon and small green and pink accents sits above a black spade shape. The spade is formed from decorative lettering reading 'We're all mad here', with bold outlines, swirls and solid black fill. The colour ink is bright and the black lettering is dense, set against plain skin in a close, straight-on view.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The hatter came up the valley road the week the Callow pit flooded, carrying a hat box tied with purple ribbon and no spade at all. The men of Dunmere said a man without a spade had no business in a village where every soul went down the shaft with one. He sat on the chapel step anyway and asked for a cup of tea, and when nobody brought one he made his own on the warm stones, pouring from a kettle no bigger than a fist.
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Mabs Pryce, who kept the Ship Inn and had buried two husbands from the seam, watched him from her window. 'Mad as a box of frogs,' she said, but she sent her boy down with bread. The hatter turned his hat round in his hands. Pinned under the band of purple silk was a playing card, a single black spade, its ink worn thin at the point. 'Every man here owes the ground a debt,' he said. 'Some pay in shifts. Some pay in names.'
The men went down anyway, because the cage was already rattling and the wages were owed. Three days later the water dropped and the hatter was gone. A teal hat sat on the pit-head bench, its ribbon knotted round the handle of a shovel. Someone had scratched letters into the blade, curling like coal smoke, and the men read them, laughed, and went back to work.
The shovel is still on the bench. Nobody has moved it, and nobody in Dunmere has ever asked who tied the ribbon.
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