Four-Leaf Clover

Yotsuba with her namesake.

All random effects are rolled +1^*(+1 per stack) times for a favorable outcome.

— 57 Leaf Clover description, Risk of Rain 2

Four Leaf Clover = Good luck charm. For this reason, four leaf clovers tend to have special significance when they appear in media. Sometimes parodied or referenced with mention of a clover that has an absurd number of leaves.

Why is it considered a good luck charm? Probably because four leaf clovers are relatively rare (the vast majority of clover stems have three leaves and only 1 in 5,000 have four leaves). Thus, finding one is a "lucky" event. While five, six or even more leaves is also possible, this is so rare that most people aren't aware of it and thus they didn't enter pop culture as "lucky". Though of course, some will insist that if four leaves is lucky, five or more leaves must be even luckier. It's math!

More info can be found here.

A subtrope of Good Luck Charm. See also Fleur-de-lis. Contrast Four Is Death.

---

Examples:

Advertising

• One of the marshmallows in Lucky Charms breakfast cereals.

Anime & Manga

• Anne Happy, a Slice of Life series surrounding several Born Unlucky girls, uses this as an ironic series-wide motif.
• In Black Clover a grimoire with a Four-Leaf Clover is a sign of a mage's great magical power and supposedly endows them with good luck. Yuno, a magical prodigy, gains one in the beginning of the story, and Licht, a powerful mage who wields incredibly rare Light Magic, has one as well. Asta, the protagonist, instead gains a Five-Leaf Clover Grimoire, with the fifth leaf signifying the presence of a demon.
• Clover uses clovers as a motif for the psychics with the most powerful being a four-leaf.
• Cross Game uses a four leaf clover motif. With each sister representing a leaf.
• Happy Happy Clover gives use the main character Chima (called Clover in English and French translations) who at first is seen wearing a three leaf clover in the first volume of the manga. But is later given a four leaf clover when she meets a human for the first time. In the anime, she wears her four leaf clover from the beginning.
• In Honey and Clover, the four leaf clover is used as a symbol of people's search for happiness, with one notable scene in which most of the main cast is looking for four leaf clovers on the river bank. And then there's the ending, where the combination of clovers and honey comes into full fruition.
• Kaitou Kid of Magic Kaito and Case Closed not only uses has a stylized four-leaved clover on his monocle, his real name, Kaito Kuroba, has the word "clover" (romaji kurobaa) in it.
• In Negima!? (second season), Yue gives one to Nodoka to give to Negi as support for her Crush on him. (Even though its a Love Triangle between the 3.)
  • The Cook Satsuki Yotsuba is named after this.
  • In the first Negima anime series 100 of these are needed for a love potion spent all night looking for them. (This is different in the manga when Negi had 7 magic pills That were placed in his bag by his cousin, that could help craft the thing.)
• Played with in Tomodachi o Tsukurou, where the heroine has three-leaf clover hair accessories to emphasize her trait of being "the normal one". A trait which is quite thoroughly discared as the series goes on.
• In Touken Ranbu - Hanamaru, Maeda and Hirano find a four-leaf clover at the beginning of episode 3. Hirano later gives it to Doudanuki after hearing how Doudanuki is suffering from a string of bad luck, which leads to a long Chain of Deals throughout the first half of the episode.
• Yotsuba Nakano in The Quintessential Quintuplets has a name that means "four-leaf clover", with her green ribbon tied up in a way that it looks like one, and one of her Image Songs is even titled as such. She's also lucky enough to be the quint Fuutarou chooses to confess his love for.
• In Yotsuba&!, the eponymous Yotsuba's name actually means "four-leaf clover". Her hair is even shaped like one, being green with four Girlish Pigtails. She gives one to Asagi as a souvenir, reminding Asagi's mother of when Asagi gave one to her... and she tasked her with finding a five-leaf clover.

Film — Live Action

• The killer leprechaun's weakness in Leprechaun.

Literature

• In Mostly Harmless, there's an alternate-universe Earth where — due to a stray bit of radiation affecting the genome of the first clover plant — four-leaf clovers are the norm and three-leaf clovers are the exception. This particular Earth also didn't get destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Coincidence? It gets destroyed in the end by the updated Guide, anyway.
• In The Patchwork Girl of Oz, one of the Oz books, a six leaf clover that can only be found near the Emerald City is an ingredient in a magical compound.

Live-Action TV

• M*A*S*H: In "Smilin' Jack," Radar talks with a young patient who had been hit three times and he's about to be sent back to the front for a third time. Radar gives the kid his four-leaf clover. "It makes you feel like nothing can happen to you," he says.
• Odd Squad: The Season 3 premiere, "Odd Beginnings", features the forty-four leaf clover, an ancient and legendary Odd Squad artifact that is thought to be nonexistent to nearly everyone, including the Big O. However, Opal, an agent working in an Arctic precinct, believes that it's real, which is only confirmed by Oswald, her pen pal, telling her that he found a map leading to the clover. The premiere follows her and her partner, Omar, as they work together with Oswald as well as Orla, the clover's guardian, to find it and protect it from two villains who are also on the hunt for it.
• Our Miss Brooks: In "Four Leaf Clover", Miss Brooks picks a four leaf clover that brings her nothing but bad luck. She eventually pawns it off to a crooked auto mechanic.

Music

• Tears for Fears: This is the motif of "Head over Heels"; the verse "This is my four-leaf clover" is sung twice, numerous animated four-leaf clovers briefly swirl around the screen in the music video, and the Picture◊ Disc◊ edition is shaped like a four-leaf clover.

Toys

• SuperThings: The character Lucky O'Green is a living four leaf clover superhero. He has the special ability "Stroke Of Luck", which turns the tides of luck towards him, bringing bad luck to his enemies.

Video Games

• Four-leaf clovers are lucky in Animal Crossing.
• One 3-star wyrmprint in Dragalia Lost features an eight-leaf clover, which supposedly has double the luck of a four-leaf clover. The accompanied story tells of a child who finds it and wants to show her mother...only to lose it. The clover changes hands a few times until she gets it back.
• Chieri in THE iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls has a four leaf clover motif so she can have family memories with her in spirit. In concerts, some of the audience hold green glowsticks in a cross shape to imitate the image.
• Kingdom of Loathing has a Ten-Leafed Clover as an item, and it triggered certain "lucky" special events to happen if you had one in your inventory. In 2022, they lost most of their luck-enhancing properties, being replaced with Eleven-Leafed Clovers that can trigger both the old Clover adventures and the formerly-hard-to-get Semi-Rare Adventures, on top of being used only when you explicitly want them to (Ten-Leaf Clovers were automatically consumed if you adventured in a zone with a Clover adventure, making it easy to accidentally waste one).
• In King's Quest I: Quest For The Crown, carrying a four-leaf clover keeps leprechauns away from you.
• Let It Die: The Four-Leaf Clover sticker item gives your Fighter an increased 10% chance to crit. The Five-Leaf Clover sticker item gives your Fighter an extra 20%. You can basically stick up to four different clover stickers on a rouge-based Fighter to give them practically guaranteed crit chance.
• In Little Big Adventure, four-leaf clovers can be used either for full healing or Auto-Revive.
• In Miitopia, the Flower job can obtain this as both a weapon and a clothing item.
• In Minigore, collecting three four-leaf clovers will turn you into a minotaur, which grants you temporary invincibility.
• NetHack: after sacrificing, you may "glimpse a four-leaf clover at your feet", which just means that you've been granted extra luck by your deity.
• Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors: Clover takes her assumed name from this motif. Nine years ago, nine four-leaf clovers were given by Light, AKA Snake, to the other players of the Nonary Game. They were to be given to his sister Clover—yes, that's her ''real'' name—for her ninth birthday. As you can tell, the number "nine" is rather important in this game.
• Persona 5: Ann Tamaki has a green four-leaf clover on the back of her hoodie, making her stand apart from the rest of the class and adding to her But Not Too Foreign identity.
• In the Monopoly based video game Richman 8, when a character stops at one on the street, they'll received two cards to help them win easier.
• In Risk of Rain, one of the many items shipped aboard the the UES Contact Light, and therefore found scattered across the surface after its crash, is a 56-leaf clover, which apparently makes you lucky enough to occasionally find items dropped by monsters instead of just chests and the like. The shipping notes suggested making an injected infusion out of it and playing the lottery afterwards. The sequel ups the ante with a 57-leaf clover, which increases the chance of your items' on-hit effects to successfully proc.
• VGA Miner: One of the items found underground is a four-leaf clover which supposedly improves your luck.
• The first few levels in Wii Party minigame "Clover Hunt" has the player searching four-leaf clovers amidst mass of three-leaf clovers.

Web Comics

• Homestuck: The number 4 member of The Felt is named Clover, and has the luck to go along with it.
• In Kidd Commander, Ulrich found and ate "seven sibling clovers from seven different soils", apparently meaning seven related clovers, with sequential leaves of one to seven. According to him, this has made him very lucky, to the point of knowing that fortune always puts him where he needs to be.
• Prequel: Katia finds a four-leaf clover and starts to hope her luck will improve. But then an audience member points out that any good-luck charm whose sole requirement for discovery is to simply be lucky, would cause a runaway exponential growth of luck as one finds more and more four-leaf clovers and gets even luckier, and since this has never happened, four-leaf clovers cannot be lucky. So she passes it onto Gharug, who doesn't believe in luck but nonetheless becomes Born Lucky from this very chain of events.

Western Animation

• The Babaloos: In one episode, a lucky clover Kevin picked sometime during the day is thrown out by Broom and Dustpan (who mistook it for stray plant matter that had somehow gotten indoors), necessitating the location of a replacement.
• An episode of Care Bears involved an eight-leaf clover that allowed for Three Wishes.
• DuckTales (2017): In "The Phantom and the Sorceress!", Gladstone Gander gets his luck drained by the Phantom Blot and, in his desperation, finds a four-leaf clover to regain his luck. He immediately then gets attacked by a rock golem, showing it didn't give him luck.
• Once on Ed, Edd n Eddy, the boys find a four-leaf clover, but have such a run of misfortune due to Double D being harassed by a smitten Sarah that they ditch the clover. Johnny 2X4 then finds the clover... and then a $20 bill, much to the Eds' chagrin.
  Eddy: Hey, wait! That's our luck!
  Edd: That's always our luck.
• The Fairly Oddparents has a 37-leaf-clover in one episode involving bad luck.
• In the Futurama episode "The Luck of the Fryrish", we see via flashback that young Fry had a seven-leaf clover that gave him the necessary luck to win basketball games or pull off crazy break-dancing moves. After his disappearance (when he was frozen and wound up in the future), it was claimed by his nephew, Philip J. Fry II.
• Inspector Gadget once found one. He was lucky that episode, but that's par for the course. In the end, after a typical amount of adventure, the clover was down to one leaf. Cue the silly laughter.
• On Milo Murphy's Law, Sara wears a four-leaf clover hair clip. Given that she's from a family where all the men are Born Unlucky and The Jinx, this could be seen as a.) a symbol of her own immunity, and/or b.) a conscious effort to counteract the bad luck that her father and brother bring whenever they're around her.
• On Rocko's Modern Life, Filburt is selected to compete on a Game Show called Mega Spin, but gets a Misfortune Cookie that brings about all sorts of bad luck. Heffer gets the idea to counter it with good luck, so he attaches a number of lucky charms to Filburt, including a hat with several four-leaf clovers. Filburt wins, although all of O-Town is destroyed after the prize wheel comes loose.

Real Life

• The New Jersey lottery uses a four leaf clover with a picture of the state in the middle as its logo, early televised drawings used the song "I'm Looking Over A Four Leaf Clover" as theme music.
• As does the symbol of the French national lottery.
• The "cloverleaf" style of freeway interchange is so named because the four inner ramps resemble a four-leaf clover.

---