Colour Japanese style tattoo of a black and white cat with red lightning, a red and white mountain and light blue clouds on the leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat with lightning and mountain on a leg

Japanese · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A black and white cat sits upright in profile, turning its head toward the viewer, with a red lightning bolt running across its body and down the design. Behind it sit a red and white snow-capped mountain and stylised light blue clouds, with bold black outlines and smooth flat fills. The tattoo is shown in close, well lit framing against pale skin, with parts of other tattoos visible at the edges.

Japanese Thigh Cat Lightning Mountain Cloud

Find an artist for this

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

Nobody in Hanamachi had seen the lightning cat sleep since the spring the kiln fires went out. Old Tomi swore it sat on the roof ridge of the lacquer shop every night, black where the moon touched it and white where the moon didn't, watching the road to the mountain as if someone owed it money.

Keep reading

The trouble began when the wind came down off Fuji and stayed for eleven days. Ink dried on the brushes before the printers could lift them. The paper mill's waterwheel stopped turning, and the children learned to read by a single tallow dip shared between six houses. Keiko, who sold rice cakes from a cart by the bridge, said the cat had grown fat on sulking. Her brother said it had been ashamed. Both were wrong, as it turned out.

On the twelfth night the cat walked down the lane, tail straight up like a rope of smoke, and stopped at Tomi's door. It did not ask. It only looked back over its shoulder, blue eyes narrowed, and began climbing the mountain path. Tomi followed with a lantern, then Keiko, then half the town in their nightclothes, grumbling all the way past the shrine.

Near the snow line the cat stopped beside a crack in the rock where a red seam of light pulsed like a vein. It caught the lightning in its teeth, the way a child catches a moth, and carried it down the slope in a glowing thread. By dawn every lamp in Hanamachi was burning, and the cat was asleep on the warm roof tiles. Tomi never found out who had stolen the storm in the first place. The cat, when he asked, only yawned.