Colour tattoo of a maneki-neko lucky cat holding a gold oval with Japanese characters, in a Japanese style on the upper leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maneki-neko lucky cat on the thigh

Japanese · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A white maneki-neko lucky cat with red ears, a red collar, pink cheeks and closed-eye expression is raised in one paw, with a small bell hanging at its neck. It holds a gold oval panel carrying two black kanji characters, and the outlines are bold and dark. The colour is applied in flat fills with light grey shading on the cat, set against the skin in a close, centred composition.

Japanese Thigh Maneki-neko Lucky cat Kanji Bell Cat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell came off the cat the night the Marisa Vell rounded the Cape, and I am still not sure whether it was the sea or the bosun who took it. The porcelain maneki-neko had travelled from Kobe wrapped in a stocking, its raised paw turned towards the forecastle as if it meant to hail somebody across the harbour. Cook kept it on the galley shelf above the flour, and every time the ship lurched the little bell gave a tinny cough that the men took for a warning.

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The storm caught us three days out of Durban. A pan slid off the range, the shelf came down with it, and the cat hit the deck and split clean down the middle of its belly. Cook swept up the pieces and put them in a biscuit tin. I was the only one who would go near the thing, so the job of gluing it fell to me. The gold oval on its chest had two black characters painted on it, and Cook told me they meant something like fortune and joy. He said it with the look of a man who had been promised nothing else.

We lost the bell in the Channel, in the dark, when the rail went and took half the lashings with it. Nobody heard it go. The next watch swore the cat rang once more before we raised the Mersey, and I did not argue, because I had felt something too.

I still have the cat. It sits on my mother's mantelpiece in Birkenhead, a seam showing down its middle where I glued it, one paw still lifted. She dusts round it every Sunday and tells the neighbours it brings the sailors home. I have never once told her it was the other way round.