Colour Japanese-style tattoo of a maneki-neko lucky cat with a red sun, cherry blossom, lotus flowers and sushi across the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maneki-neko lucky cat with blossom on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A cream and black maneki-neko cat sits at the centre, raising one paw and holding a gold oval coin marked with Japanese characters, with a gold bell on a red collar. Behind it are a red sunburst, pink cherry blossom branches, lotus flowers and pieces of nigiri sushi. The work uses bold outlines, soft blended shading and bright colour, and the design fills the curve of the upper arm.

Japanese Upper arm Maneki-neko Lucky cat Cherry blossom Lotus Sun Coin Bell

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat had been waving at the harbour for forty years before Keiko Tanaka noticed it was waving with the wrong paw. Her father had bought it from a closing gift shop in Whitby in 1979, a cream-coloured thing with a gold coin across its belly and a bell on a red ribbon, and he had set it in the front window of the fish bar as a joke about luck. Nobody in town took the joke seriously until the lifeboat crew started touching its ear on the way out.

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She came home from London that October with a box of nigiri she had made badly, rice falling apart under the salmon, and found the cat turned to face the wall. Her father was in the Infirmary with his chest. The lotus pots on the sill had been watered, and someone had tied a strip of red silk around the bell so it would not ring in the wind. She knew without asking that it was the regulars, the old men who came for the mackerel and never said much.

She spent the winter learning the characters on the coin from a library book, slowly, the way you learn a language from a menu. The book said they meant gathering in good fortune, though the man who sold her father the cat had apparently told him they meant wait for the tide. In February she turned the cat back to the street. The low sun caught the gold of the bell and the blossom painted behind it, pink where the paint had chipped, and the first boats came round the pier with their lights still on.