Red and cream woodcut-style drawing of a top hat with the words WE ARE ALL MAD HERE lettered across its crown, with radiating lines either side.

We are all mad here top hat

Lettering · Colour · Flash

A top hat is drawn in deep red on a cream background, with the words WE ARE ALL MAD HERE set in large lettering across the crown. The hat has engraved hatching and textured shading, and short radiating lines sit on either side of it. The composition is centred and symmetrical, with the brim curving across the lower part of the image.

Lettering Top hat Lettering Text Radiating lines Hatching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fog came down on Skerra the week the mainland surveyors landed, and Tamsin Rook climbed to the hatter's loft with a bolt of red wool and a grudge. Her brother had signed the cliff field over to a man with a ledger, and nobody on the island would say the thing aloud. So she asked old Hob Carrow, who had been the island's hatter since before the lighthouse was a rumour, to sew something onto a crown that would say it for them.

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Hob turned the block three times and said the island had always been a little mad to stay out here at all, and that a hat should say so plainly. He cut the letters from the wool and set them in a line across the crown, WE ARE ALL MAD HERE, then ran the hatching down the sides with a bone needle until the felt looked like wood grain after rain. Tamsin wore it to the surveyors' table. Nobody laughed, which was worse, because they had all been thinking the same thing and only now had a hat to point at.

The surveyors left on the Tuesday boat. Her brother came back to the loft the following week, sheepish, asking for the hat so he could wear it to chapel. Tamsin said no. Hob laughed until he coughed and told her the hat had never been hers to keep, only to lend to whoever was brave enough to be the one who said it.

On the last evening of fog, the hat was found floating in the harbour, crown down like a boat, the red letters still legible against the water. Hob fished it out with a gaff and dried it by the stove, and he said the sea had sent it back to be sure.