Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maneki-neko lucky cat with cherry blossom

Japanese · Calf · Colour · Photo

A beckoning maneki-neko cat sits at the centre, with a red collar, a gold bell, and a gold oval coin marked with black characters. Pink cherry blossom flowers, green leaves and falling petals surround the cat against a soft dark shaded background. Bold black outlines, smooth colour fills and soft shading are used throughout, and the two photos show the same tattoo from slightly different angles.

Japanese Calf Maneki-neko Lucky cat Cat Cherry blossom Flower Petal Bell Collar Coin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat came up from the cellar in a tea chest, wrapped in a page of the Hexham Courant, and the first thing I did was knock its paw off on the stairwell. Mr Dacre stuck it back with epoxy that smelled of pear drops. That was nineteen years ago, and it has been beckoning at the gatehouse ever since.

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We are a ruin, properly. Callow Keep lost its roof in 1643 and its good name shortly after, and what remains is three walls, a well nobody dares lean over, and a hatch in the gatehouse where I sell tea and postcards. The coaches stop for the cherry tree. Lady Anne planted it in the bailey, the guidebook says, so she would have something to look at while she waited for a husband who never came home. In April it drops pink over the stones and people photograph it until their phones are full.

This spring the coaches stopped coming. A road closed at Corbridge, then a letter from the trust, then nothing at all. I sat in the hatch with the cat and counted the coins in the gold oval on its chest, which was the only money I had. On the Tuesday the rain stopped, a boy came up the hill alone, muddy to the knees, asking if this was the place with the lucky cat. He had seen it online. I told him the cat belonged to nobody, and he said everything in a photo belonged to somebody.

He took his picture and left. On Friday I turned the cat round so its raised paw faced the lane instead of the empty bailey. I have never believed in luck held in a little gold coin, but I do believe in a paw held up long enough. By Saturday the lane was full of cars, and the cat, for once looking at the road, seemed rather pleased with itself.