Coloured pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing a black top hat, pocket watch, playing card, Drink Me tag and a purple and pink striped tail, with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Top hat, pocket watch and Drink Me tag design

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A hand-drawn coloured pencil design shows a black top hat with a red band and a small tag reading Drink Me, set beside a pocket watch on a beaded chain and a playing card. A purple and pink striped shape, possibly a tail, sits across the bottom of the hat. The bold dark outlines and layered pencil shading are set against a plain paper background with loose coloured pencils at the edges.

Neo-trad Top hat Pocket watch Playing card Ribbon Chain

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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 hatbox came through the scanner at Dover just after two in the morning, tied shut with blue ribbon, and Ruth Okonedo knew before she lifted the lid that it would cost her a cup of tea and a form. The screen showed a dense grey shape that refused to resolve into anything a sensible person would carry. "Open it for me, sir," she said to the man in the camel coat, who smiled as though he had been hoping someone would ask.

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Inside sat a black top hat with a red band, a silver pocket watch on a beaded chain, and a playing card bent at one corner, its red heart worn pale by handling. Tucked into the band was a paper tag with frayed string and two words in careful capitals: DRINK ME. The watch was ticking, but when Ruth held it to her ear the hands ran anticlockwise, as if they were catching up on something.

"Anything to declare?" she asked. "Only the tail," he said. "It isn't mine to declare."

She tipped the box toward the light and a striped tail uncoiled from beneath the hat, purple banded with pink, and curled once around her wrist with the patience of a cat that had already made up its mind. Ruth reached for the stamp. Her fingers had gone cold. The tail loosened, slid back into the box, and the watch gave a small click she felt in her teeth. She stamped ADMITTED across the manifest, and the man thanked her and walked out into the car park. Only later, when the shift ended and she glanced up at the clock above the desk, did she notice it read a minute to midnight, and had done so all night.