Yeah, looks like with the memestatic, they prevent hotlinking or even direct linking to the image. I think the way hotlinking works is based on your referrer. When you load the page, it'll send the referrer to the other website asking for the image. If they've blocked all referrers except their own, it won't show. Sometimes, it might appear occasionally if the referrer you send to them is blank.
The reason the memestatic showed for you initially, is because you viewed on their website and as you said it was in your browser cache so the browser didn't need to contact them to get the image. I recommend hosting images on the free-image hosting sites. Back in my day, it was imageshack and photobucket but there doesn't seem to be many left other than imgur.