Lettering tattoo on a thigh with a quote from Alice in Wonderland beside a shaded gold pocket watch, playing card suits and red accents.

Quote, pocket watch and playing card suits on a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo features a looping script quote reading "Have I gone mad" and a continuation below it, set beside a shaded gold pocket watch with a dangling chain. A club, a spade and a red heart sit among flowing ink swirls above the text. The script is black and grey, while the watch and red accents add colour, and the design fills the frame against plain skin.

Lettering Realism Thigh Quote Script Pocket watch Chain Club Spade Heart

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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

The herald is bellowing your name across the flagstones of Quillmere, but you have stopped at the foot of the clock tower to listen to the watch in your palm. It ticks backwards on Tuesdays, everyone knows that, and today is Tuesday. Behind you the card soldiers are painting the last white rose red, as they do every morning, and their brushes drip onto the cobbles like a slow, polite rain.

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When he reaches you, breathless, with his spade-shaped badge swinging on its ribbon, he asks whether you have gone mad. You tell him you are afraid so, because the watch has just informed you that the Queen is forty years old and holding a trial for a tart that has not been baked yet. He laughs, then stops, because the cobblestones have started to hum and the chain on your wrist has begun to warm like a fish just pulled from a river.

The steward who raised you always said the court was entirely bonkers, but the bonkers ones are the only residents who ever leave the castle with their hats on. So you wind the chain twice around your fingers, step past the herald and walk straight through the painted door at the base of the tower, where the stairs go down instead of up and the air smells of cold tea and cut clover.

At the bottom a lamp is burning, and beside it sits a hare with a pocket watch of his own. He leans forward and tells you the secret you were promised, the one the whole kingdom pretends not to know. All the best people are.