Black and grey tattoo on a calf showing the Mad Hatter in a top hat labelled In this Style 10/6, with a White Rabbit and the Queen of Hearts above on a checkerboard background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mad Hatter, White Rabbit and Queen of Hearts on a calf

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the Mad Hatter in a top hat and bow tie at the centre, with the White Rabbit and the Queen of Hearts above him against a black and white checkerboard. The linework is fine and detailed, with stippled and hatched shading that builds up the faces, fabric and hat. The design is entirely in black and grey ink and fills a tall panel that runs up the leg.

Calf Top hat Bow tie Alice in wonderland

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Oswin Pell had sold forty-one hats since Michaelmas and not one of them had been bought for the price written on the ticket. The customers haggled, paid in buttons and bent pennies, and on Thursday a sailor's widow had tried to pay in a sealed jar of pickled walnuts. Pell stood at the counter of his shop on Cable Street, tying the last of the black ribbons, and watched the lamplighter's boy press his nose to the glass.

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The shop had been his father's, and before that a cobbler's, and the floor still bore the squares of chequered tile the cobbler had laid to hide his spilt glue. Pell liked the pattern. It made customers feel they were stepping across a game, and a man who feels he is playing rarely argues about the stakes. On the shelf behind him sat a row of wooden blocks, each steamed and shaped, each waiting for a head.

The widow came back at dusk with the walnuts wrapped in her good shawl. She did not want a hat. She wanted to know why the card on the tall beaver said In this Style, 10/6, when the beaver itself was plainly the finest thing in London. Pell looked at the card and then at her, and the corner of his mouth moved in a way his late wife had once called dangerous.

"Because it is ten and six, madam," he said, "and I am not the man to tell a fine hat what it costs." He lifted the beaver from its block, turned it once against the lamp, and set it on her grey head, where it sat as though it had been waiting for her. She counted out ten and six in farthings, set the walnuts on the counter, and walked home under the brim without a word of thanks, while Pell carried the jar to the back room and wondered how long pickled walnuts kept.