Colour tattoo of a white and grey maneki-neko beckoning cat with a red hat, blue collar and bell, framed by red flowers, in a Japanese and neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maneki-neko cat with red flowers

Japanese · Colour · Photo

A beckoning cat, a maneki-neko, sits front on with one paw raised, wearing a red hat, a blue collar with a small bell and a red and white charm hanging at its side. Two red flowers with green leaves sit at the bottom corners of the design. The bold dark outlines and flat colour fills are softened by light shading on the cat's white and grey fur, and the image is cropped closely around the tattoo.

Japanese Neo-trad Maneki-neko Cat Bell Collar Flower Lucky cat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on the upturned crate, love, and mind the guy rope, it bites. You want the story of the cat? Everyone asks about the cat and nobody ever asks what she costs, which tells you something about people. Right, hush now, the generator's coughing and I'm only telling this once.

Keep reading

Ada Vine kept the hook-a-duck and the tin cat on the counter of her caravan for forty-one seasons, travelling from Frome to Stroud and back with the same mud on the same wheels. The cat was a little white thing with a red hat, a blue collar with a brass bell, a red and white charm swinging from a cord, and two painted poppies at her feet. Ada always said the raised paw was for beckoning customers in. Her mother said it was for beckoning the rain. Both were right, and neither of them would tell you which came first.

The autumn Ada turned seventy, a boy called Tobias Greer came to the hoopla with a sixpence and a face like wet paper. His gran was in the hospital in Stroud and he wanted a bear for her bed, and he had exactly one sixpence and no way to win it. Ada looked at him, then at the little bell he'd unhooked from his dog's collar to bring with him. "Trade me that," she said. He did. She hung it on the cat's collar, beside her own, and the paw went up so high the red charm swung right round.

Tobias won his bear that night, and the rain stopped before morning. Ada never hooked a duck again without that bell ringing first, and every stall-holder on the run learned to listen for it. So when you hear it on your walk past, stop. She's waving at you, and she's never once been wrong about who needs to come in.