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Ninjacat
“Welcome to the Internet, Please Follow me.”
A cat riding a unicorn with a gold Desert Eagle. Jason Heuser painted it in August 2012 and the internet has been carrying it ever since. Microsoft built a mascot on it and went looking for him to say so.
01 · The codex
Fourteen years, one leaf at a time.
Turn the page. Every chapter carries the source it rests on, so you can check the claim rather than take it.
02 · The record
This meme has papers.
Most coins point at an image nobody can source. This one has a title, a date, a signature in the corner and an artist who has been selling prints of it for fourteen years. Every claim below sits on the artist's own posting.
- Title
- Welcome to the Internet, Please Follow me
- Artist
- Jason Heuser, working as SharpWriter
- Published
- DeviantArt, 20 August 2012
- File
- 1920 × 1296 · 4.98 MB · Photoshop CS5
- Signed
- HEUSER 2012, lower right
- The artist
- “Whats more awesome then a cat riding a unicorn? Answer: A cat riding a unicorn with a golden desert eagle.”
Why the name is Ninjacat
-
The artist sells it under that name. Heuser's own print listing is titled Welcome to the Internet (ninja Cat on a Unicorn 2010s Meme). The rights holder is the first source, and he calls it Ninjacat.
-
Microsoft ran it for seven years. Windows Insider emblem, official wallpapers down to the Microsoft Band, a Skype easter egg, its own emoji. Every one of them called it Ninjacat.
-
Nothing else survives contact. “Rambo Cat” traces to a single 2020 blog post that misread the signature as WEUSER and called a Desert Eagle a Glock. It is third-party, five years old and built on two errors. You cannot own it and it leads nowhere.
Ninjacat is the only name the artist and the largest company that ever used the picture both agree on. The painting's real title, Welcome to the Internet, Please Follow me, is the line at the top of this page. The ticker is the name people already search.
Correction the internet still gets wrong
The blocky H reads as a W at low resolution, so half the web credits this
painting to WEUSER. It is HEUSER. The same article that
spread the misreading also called the gun a golden Glock. It is a gold
Desert Eagle, and the artist said so himself in the original post.