Pencil and ink flash drawing of a neo-traditional maneki-neko lucky cat with a raised paw, a fan and a bell collar, surrounded by leaves and flowers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maneki-neko lucky cat design with flowers

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A drawn design of a maneki-neko lucky cat with a raised paw, a bell on a red collar and a patterned fan held in its other paw. Bold dark outlines sit over pink and red shading, with grey pencil used for the leaves and flowers behind the cat. The cat is centred on the sheet, with the foliage framing it on both sides.

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

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's still wet from the mop, and keep your fingers out of the proving drawers unless you fancy my nephew's wooden spoon. Sit there by the cat. Aye, that one. It's been staring at that door since four, same as me, so we've time for its story before the first van comes up the hill.

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It came to this shop in the winter of 1961, wrapped in a seaman's jumper and handed across the counter by a sailor called Dennis Ashby, who said he'd won it off a Yokohama barman at cards and couldn't abide the thing looking at him. Ruth Calloway, who owned the place then, put it on the shelf above the till and said it would keep her in flour. Flour was dear that year. The cat said nothing, which was more than the bank manager managed.

Every morning Ruth lifted its painted paw and said, not yet, to the dark outside, and every morning she went to the ovens anyway. She fanned the cooling trays with the little patterned fan it holds in its other hand, and when the bell on its red collar rang, the first customer was always a boy named Tom Pickering with a penny in his fist. He'd sit on the flour sacks and eat his bun while the frost melted off the window. Ruth let him have the crusts for free. She said a cat that's watched a lot of mornings has earned a good deal of credit.

Tom went to sea in the end, the way the Ashbys and the Pickerings always did. Forty years on he came back up the hill, grey as a gull, and bought a single bun, and when the bell rang he laughed out loud. The paw was still up. Nobody had ever thought to take it down.