Colour Japanese style tattoo of a maneki-neko lucky cat with a red bell and pink cherry blossoms on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maneki-neko lucky cat and cherry blossoms on a calf

Japanese · Calf · Colour · Photo

A smiling maneki-neko lucky cat sits centrally, with closed eyes, pink cheeks, a teal ribbon and a gold bell, and holds a red and yellow striped koban coin. Pink cherry blossom flowers, small pink hearts and dotted accents surround the cat across the leg. The shading is soft and smooth, with bold outlines and bright colour dominating the design.

Japanese Calf Maneki-neko Cat Lucky cat Cherry blossom Flower Bell Ribbon Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The maneki-neko sat on the galley shelf above the stove of the cargo steamer Pelham Rose, bound from Yokohama for Liverpool with forty days of rice, tea and tinned peaches ahead of her. Cook Albert Fenn had bought it for a shilling from a stall in Kobe because his mother always said a cat that waves brings custom. Nobody aboard had seen a customer in six weeks. They had seen only grey water and the second mate's bad temper, and Fenn had started talking to the cat about both.

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Off the Cape the weather turned. The bell on the cat's teal ribbon rang every time the ship rolled, and the stokers swore it was counting waves. On the third night the lamp went out and the ship shuddered as if something had struck her. In the dark, Fenn heard a thin cry from the forward hold, a boy who had gone down to check a lashing and been caught by a shifting crate. He could not see his own hands, but he could hear the bell swinging on the shelf, steady and bright, and he followed the sound through the flooded passage with a rope tied round his waist.

They came up at dawn, soaked and grey, with the boy between them and the koban coin still gripped in the cat's painted paw. Fenn tied a fresh ribbon from his wife's old sash over the frayed one and tucked a cherry blossom petal, pressed flat in the logbook, beneath the cat's chin. When the Pelham Rose finally berthed at Liverpool, a docker on the quay laughed at the cat's raised paw and asked whose luck it was waving at. Fenn lifted it down from the shelf and considered the question for a long moment. Then he told the docker that the cat had been waving at the sea, and the sea had decided to be polite.