Small Japanese style maneki-neko lucky cat tattoo on the ankle, with a red collar, pink ears and black outlines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maneki-neko lucky cat on an ankle

Japanese · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo of a white maneki-neko lucky cat with a red collar, reddish-brown ears and a raised paw, with a grey round object beside it. The linework is dark and defined, with simple flat fills and light grey shading on the object. The design sits on the side of an ankle against a soft, dimly lit background.

Japanese Ankle Cat Maneki-neko Lucky cat Coin

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind out here takes half of every sentence, so you'll have to lean in to catch the rest. You want the story of the cat at the Ocotillo Fork? Everyone on this road knows that cat, though not everyone knows where it came from. Old Mariam kept the petrol pump there when the town was still a town, and she kept a cat on the shop sill, white as bread, with one paw lifted as if it were hailing a bus that had not yet been invented.

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One August a driver named Eli Varga came through with an empty wallet and a load of melons nobody wanted. He begged a tank of diesel on credit. Mariam refused, then laughed at him, and tapped the cat's raised paw with a dented coin from her apron. Pay what the cat would pay, she said. He had no idea what that meant, so he drove off with his melons and his debt, and the road swallowed him south.

Three weeks later he came back sunburnt and broke, ready to beg again. The cat was still on the sill, but the coin was gone from beside it. In its place lay a note in Mariam's cramped hand: the pump is yours if you stop for whoever is stranded. He stood in the heat a long while before he understood that the cat had never wanted money at all. It only wanted someone to pull in and ask.

Now the pump is mine, and every driver who turns off the highway gets a cup of tea and a look at that cat. Hold up your hand, friend, the way it does. There. Something always comes along out here, if you are willing to wait for it.