Colour tattoo on the top of a foot showing a white cartoon cat in a red bow and red collar, holding a gold coin, with bold black outlines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hello Kitty as a lucky cat on a foot

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A cartoon cat with a red bow, red collar and gold bell is shown in the style of a maneki-neko lucky cat, with one paw raised and a gold coin carrying Chinese characters at its base. The design has thick black outlines, flat fills and a green and blue base beneath the figure. The tattoo sits across the top of a foot with the toes visible below it, and the colours are bright and evenly saturated.

Traditional Japanese Other Cat Lucky cat Maneki-neko Bow Coin Cartoon character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Porthallow could agree on where the cat had come from. Gwen Tresize swore it had washed up in a crate of Japanese tea bowls off the Penzance boat, and Dai Pritchard said his brother-in-law had carried it ashore himself, wrapped in a fishing net. What everyone agreed on was that it sat in the window of the chandlery facing the slip, one paw lifted, smiling with its eyes shut, and that since the day it arrived the boats had come in with their holds full.

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Harriet Lowe, who kept the shop and the ledgers, did not believe in luck. She believed in the tide tables and the smell of diesel, and she told Gwen so every morning while she unlocked the till. The cat was a nuisance. It shed red ribbon onto the rope coils, and its gold coin had gone green at the edges from the sea air. Still, when the Sunday gale tore the mooring off the Mary Ann and stove her hull against the wall, the first thing Harriet did was carry the cat inside and wipe its face with her sleeve.

Nobody ever found out what the characters on the coin said. A visiting trader read them out one wet afternoon, then looked embarrassed and said they probably meant something about a large amount, and that the coin was a sort of promise. Harriet put her hand flat on the glass and said that was fair enough, since she had been promised a great many things by men with boats.

The Mary Ann was back in the water by Easter. Harriet kept the cat exactly where it was, paw up, pointed at the harbour mouth, and every evening on her way home she tipped her cap to it.