Colour tattoo of a maneki-neko lucky cat with pink blossoms on the upper arm, in a traditional Japanese style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maneki-neko lucky cat on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A white and orange maneki-neko lucky cat with a raised paw and a red collar with a green and gold detail fills most of the frame, with pink flowers placed around it. Bold black outlines and flat, solid fills are used, with a dark patterned shape at the lower left. The skin is shown against a grey top and an indoor background.

Japanese Traditional Upper arm Maneki-neko Lucky cat Flower Cherry blossom

Find an artist for this

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

The reunion was held in the function room above the Lion, which still smelled of the same carpet cleaner. Mr Okafor's old classroom had been turned into a bar, and somebody had pinned our Year Nine photographs to a corkboard by the toilets, so I spent the first hour hunting for my own face among thirty-one others and deciding I didn't much like it.

Keep reading

Tomasz Wilk was by the buffet, holding a sausage roll as though it had insulted him. He'd lived two doors down on Ashworth Street, and his dad ran the Golden Fortune off Deansgate, a shop so narrow the only room for stock was the window. In that window sat a ceramic cat, white with orange patches, one paw lifted as if it had just remembered something. We used to dare each other to touch its paw. Nobody ever did, not because it was forbidden but because it looked like it might wave back.

"Dad sold it in March," Tomasz said. "Shop's a nail bar now." He said it lightly, the way you'd mention the weather. I asked where the cat had gone. He shrugged and said his dad had taken it to Leeds, to his brother, who'd lost his own place the year before. "Figured it should go where it's needed. Lucky, that one. Spends its whole life waving at people who've already left."

I laughed, but he didn't. We stood by the corkboard while someone put on a song from 1997 that nobody could name, and I looked for my face again, this time without minding it much. Then I lifted my hand the way you do across a crowded room, palm out. On the far side of the floor a woman I didn't recognise lifted hers back, and for a moment we were both just waving.