Small black and red Japanese maneki-neko lucky cat tattoo with a red collar and raised paw, shown on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maneki-neko lucky cat tattoo

Japanese · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A seated white maneki-neko lucky cat with closed eyes, black outlines, black ear and paw patches, and a red collar with a red ear detail. The bold, even linework and flat fills are set against pale skin on a close, centred crop. The red accents and black outlines give a simple, graphic look.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo had kept the cat in the window of the corner shop on Harrow Road for thirty-one years, and when the place was sold to a man who wanted it gutted, she wrapped it in a tea towel and carried it home on the 16 bus herself. The cat did not complain. Its paw stayed up, as it always had, and its eyes stayed shut, as if it had been asked to wait for something it already knew was coming.

Keep reading

Her grandson Dev took it off her hands the following spring, when the flat in Kilburn had no room for anything that didn't earn its keep. He set it on the sill above the kettle, where the steam made the red collar bead, and within a week the brown envelopes had stopped stacking on the doormat. He called this coincidence. His nan, on the phone every Sunday, called it manners.

The interview letter came in June, the one he had given up on in March. He read it twice standing at the sink, then lifted the cat down to check the base, because he half expected a price sticker still stuck there from 1994. There was one. It said 40p in faded biro, and beneath it, in his nan's careful hand, a line he had never noticed: Keep the left paw up for the ones who come back.

He laughed until the kettle boiled over, then wiped the hob, put the cat back on the sill and turned it so its raised paw faced the door.

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