Colour Japanese style tattoo of a maneki-neko lucky cat with a red lotus and cherry blossoms on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maneki-neko cat with lotus on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A white maneki-neko cat with green eyes and a red collar bell sits on a gold oval coin marked with kanji, above a large red lotus flower. Cherry blossoms and a light blue background frame the cat. The bold outlines and soft shading are filled with bright colour, and the design is centred on the upper arm.

Japanese Neo-trad Upper arm Maneki-neko Cat Lucky cat Lotus Cherry blossom Coin Bell Kanji

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat has been beckoning at the Dagenham crowd since the spring, and by the time the fair reaches Margate you have stopped noticing its paw. You wind the brass key on its back every evening, the way your nan showed you, and it lifts its arm and holds it there like a man hailing a bus that will never come. Nobody on the coconut shy wants to hear about luck. They want the glass jar of sherbet lemons on the top shelf.

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Then a girl in a grey anorak stops at the stall with a coin she has clearly been saving since breakfast. She asks whether the cat is real. You tell her it is older than the pier, and that a potter in Osaka once painted the gold oval on its belly with characters meaning something like plenty. She doesn't ask why the lotus sits underneath it. You don't tell her that the lotus was added by a boy who sold you the cat for two quid, and who swore the flower only opens for people who are leaving town.

She drops the coin in the slot. Nothing happens. The paw stays up. You reach to wind it again, and the little bell at its throat gives one small ring, and the petals seem to flush a shade brighter under the bulb. The girl laughs and says she will come back when the lights are on. You know she won't. Nobody comes back to the same fair twice in this country.

At closing, you lift the cat down from its shelf and wrap it in a tea towel. Behind the stall the painted blossom on the backboard is still shivering in the wind off the sea. You tuck the cat into the crook of your arm, paw raised at nothing in particular, and walk towards the caravans, beckoning the dark to follow.