Colour Japanese style tattoo of a maneki-neko lucky cat holding a gold coin, with koi fish and clouds, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maneki-neko lucky cat on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A white maneki-neko lucky cat with red ears and cheeks sits holding a gold coin, with a bell collar and a koi fish beside it. Stylised waves and swirling clouds fill the background, with black linework on the clouds and bold colour on the cat, fish and waves. The tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder, with the design wrapping around the arm in a vertical composition.

Japanese Upper arm Maneki-neko Lucky cat Koi Cloud Wave Bell

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The white cat had sat on the Hughes kitchen shelf since before the strike, a porcelain thing with red ears and a gold coin held against its chest, and nobody in Pant-yr-Ond gave it much thought until the fourth week of the flood. The water had come up through the Deep Level, and nine men were still below at the eighty-fathom mark when the cage jammed on its rope. Mari Hughes took the cat down, wiped its face with the corner of her apron, and set it in the front window, facing the pithead, with its paw raised.

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The old men said the carp in the millrace knew the way under the hill, and that the clouds banked over the spoil heaps were the same clouds that had hung over the valley before there were pits at all. Mari did not argue with them. Each evening she lifted the cat's paw a finger's width higher, and each morning the pump engine coughed and went quiet and coughed again. Her Idris was among the nine. She stopped counting the days on the wall and started counting the times she had turned the cat.

On the thirty-first morning the cage came up with all nine in it, grey to the eyebrows and blinking at the light. Afterwards, Mari found the gold coin lying bright in the mud by the pit gate, where no one had been standing. It had not been in her window.

She put the coin back in the cat's hand and turned it to face the kitchen. Idris asked her why it was still raised, and she told him it was waiting for the next shift.