Colour traditional tattoo on the back of a neck showing a top hat, teacup, pocket watch, playing card spades and a banner reading We're all mad here.

Mad Hatter top hat and teacup on a neck

Traditional · Neck · Mixed · Photo

A top hat sits at the centre of the design, with a teacup on the left, a pocket watch at the bottom and a banner reading "We're all mad here" across the top and lower edge. Spades and red diamond shapes surround the hat, and a small 10/6 tag appears on the hat band. The bold black outlines and shaded greys on the hat and watch contrast with red, orange and brown colour fills, shown in a close-up of the back of the neck.

Traditional Neck Top hat Teacup Pocket watch Playing card Spade Diamond Banner Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Edie had been selling hats off the back of the narrowboat since the locks froze, and by March the stock had gone soft at the brims. The top hat was the last of her father's, a silk thing with a band gone grey, and it had sat on the roof hatch for a fortnight with a brown paper ticket pinned to it that read 10/6 in her own careful hand. Nobody wanted it. The men on the towpath wanted caps, and the women from the boatyard wanted scarves.

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Then a lad in a wet coat came to the side hatch on a Tuesday, asking for a cup of tea rather than a hat. She gave him one anyway, in the chipped china, and he sat on the cratch board turning a pocket watch over in his palm. He said it ran fast since the Cut flooded. He said he would trade it for the hat. Edie laughed, then stopped, because a card was tucked behind the watch face, the three of spades, and the ink on it was still wet.

They played for an hour in the cabin with the stove ticking. Every hand he won, he sipped his tea and told her the time was ten to six. Every hand she won, the watch ran slower. By the time the lock keeper's lamp came on across the water, the hat sat on his head and the watch lay face up on the table, its hands stopped at a quarter past.

He left by the towpath without a word. Edie found the ticket on the table, turned over, and written on the back in pencil: We're all mad here. Under it, in the same hand, was a line she didn't remember writing: pay on the next lock.