White ink tattoo reading "We're all mad here" in decorative capitals across an arm, with a patterned fabric sleeve visible at the left.

"We're all mad here" lettering on an arm

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a single line of lettering reading "WE'RE ALL MAD HERE" in white ink on the skin of an arm. The letters have thin, decorative serif-style forms with ornamental flourishes on the first and last words, and the ink is pale against the skin tone. The composition is tightly framed on the tattoo, with a blue patterned fabric at the left edge and a plain pale background at the right.

Lettering Other Lettering Quote Text White ink

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass bell over the door of the Hatter's Rest had been ringing all morning, and Ada Pellow had three brushes in her mouth when Mr Gorringe came back in with the proof. He held it up to the window as if the light might improve it. 'Too short,' he said. 'A shop wants a sentence over its door, Miss Pellow, not a dare.'

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She had sketched the letters twice on paper, once in the flourished capitals the customers liked, with a W that curled like a teapot spout. She told him the line was the Cheshire cat's, said to a girl who had asked the way somewhere, and that nobody ever got anywhere by asking madmen. He said that was precisely the joke. The rain came down the High Street all afternoon. She mixed white lead with linseed and a drop of gum and painted the words backwards on the inside of the pane so they would read true from the pavement.

When the sign went up, customers came in grinning, the way people do when they think they have been let in on something, and ordered pots of Assam with their gloves still on. A small boy from the chandler's stood under it every morning reading it aloud, slowly, the way children read things they are not sure they are allowed to. Mr Gorringe paid her in silver and a slice of seed cake.

Three winters later the paint had blistered where the sun caught the glass. Ada scraped the old letters away with a razor, sat on the step with her palette, and began again on the same word and the same curl of the W. The boy had grown tall enough to read it without standing on his toes. He did, then looked up at her and said, 'Are we, though?' She dipped her brush and told him they were, and that it was the best thing a shop could be told.