Four-panel collage of tattoos: a cat with a skull and lotus in traditional colour, a cat with a red daruma doll in traditional colour, a black and grey Japanese lion on a back, and a black and grey

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four cat and Japanese motif tattoos

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

The collage shows four tattoo photographs. The top two are in colour: a black and white cat with green eyes entwined with a skull and a pink lotus, and a cat sitting on a red daruma doll with a striped cushion. The bottom two are in black and grey, showing a Japanese lion with cloud and foliage details across a back, and a reclining cat among cherry blossom sprigs with bold outlines and solid black fill.

Japanese Traditional Back Neck Other Cat Skull Lotus Lion Cherry blossom Cloud Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, the root's loose, and don't let the lamp gutter, because the cat will smell the oil and come asking. Yes, that cat. The black and white one with the green eyes that sleeps on the shrine steps in Kasumi Hollow, where the cedars give up and the village begins.

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Her name was Tomo, and she belonged to the old woman who kept the paper lanterns. Every winter the old woman bought a daruma from the cart man, a round red fellow with no eyes, and she painted in one eye with her wish, then waited for the second until the wish came true. Tomo thought this was foolishness. Each evening she sat on the red doll and pressed her weight down, because a daruma that cannot fall over is a daruma that keeps its promises.

One year the old woman died in the snow, and the lanterns went out one by one along the path. Tomo went up into the cedars, where a white skull lay under the roots of a fallen pine. The skull had been a monk's, the story goes, a man who had wished for nothing and so had nothing to lose. Tomo curled herself around it, and a pink lotus opened in the frost where no lotus should grow.

When the thaw came, the village found the lantern path lit again, every wick burning from below, and a red doll standing upright at the crossroads with both its eyes painted. Nobody knows who painted the second. Tomo was never seen again, but on cold nights, if you walk the cedars with a lamp, you may hear a small bell under the pine, ringing only when someone is about to make a wish.