Colour tattoo of a maneki-neko lucky cat surrounded by pink cherry blossoms in a Japanese style, on the upper thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maneki-neko lucky cat with cherry blossoms

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A beckoning maneki-neko cat sits at the centre, with a red ear, green collar with a gold bell, and a gold oval charm bearing black characters. Pink cherry blossoms with yellow centres surround the cat on all sides. Bold black outlines contain flat colour fills, with soft grey shading on the cat's white body and a few teal and green spots.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat on the gate post at Oyama lifted one paw every morning, and every morning the cherry petals settled on the gold charm at its chest as if someone had counted them out. Old Tomi, who swept the temple steps, said the cat was beckoning the tree to shed. Her grandson Kenji said it was beckoning the postman. Neither was wrong, because the postman brought the letter that spring, and the letter came from the city.

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The letter said the rice merchant's son would not be coming back up the valley road. Tomi read it twice on the step, folded it small, and dropped it into the cat's bowl, where the village kept its coins for the temple roof. Nobody could say how the bowl came to be full every winter, only that it always was, and that a cat with a bell on its collar never went hungry.

That summer Kenji went down to the river with a fishing line and came back with nothing but a split oar and a story about a boat carrying a pale lantern. He would not say who had been in it, and Tomi did not ask. She walked to the gate and tapped the cat's raised paw with one finger, the way you tap a friend's shoulder to get their attention.

In autumn the tree had no blossom left to give, but the petals still came down on the charm. Kenji swept them into a heap and found the coins gone from the bowl. In their place lay a single cherry stone, polished smooth, with the letter rolled tight inside it. Tomi laughed for the first time in a year and told him to dig a hole by the wall before the frost came.

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