Traditional Japanese style colour tattoo of a white maneki-neko lucky cat with a green patterned collar and gold bell, surrounded by red flowers, on the thigh.

Maneki-neko lucky cat with flowers on a thigh

Japanese · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a white maneki-neko lucky cat wearing a red collar and a green patterned garment with a gold bell, holding an orange oval coin with a black character. Red blossoms with green leaves surround the cat and coin, filling the upper leg. Bold black outlines define the forms, with soft black shading on the cat's body and fine whiskers, and the palette is bright and saturated.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat has been beckoning at the flour sacks since Tuesday, and you have stopped trying to turn it round. Its paw rises and falls on the hidden spring, the brass bell under its chin ticking each time it dips, and at ten past four in the morning that is the loudest thing in Halloran's bakery apart from the proving drawers breathing and the extractor fan roaring over the ovens.

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Dilys bought it from a gift shop on the harbour in 1979, the year she signed the lease, and she always said the bell mattered more than the paw. She painted the whiskers back on herself after the first winter flaked them off. The coin in its hand carries a black character in brushwork that nobody on the street can read, so everyone assumes it says bread. You stopped asking Dilys what it said the week before she died, and the cat has been your business since.

The back door rattles at twenty to five. It is only the milk, Ferris with his crates and his cough, but you stand with a tray of cooling rolls in your hands and feel the old fear, the one about the letter from the council, the one about the rent. The cat keeps reaching. You set the tray down and go to the door, and Ferris says the morning is cold, and you say it is, and you look back past the racks.

The paw is pointed at the oven, not the door. It has always been reaching for the oven, and you were the one looking the other way.

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