Black ink tattoo of a retro game controller with cartoon characters across the shoulder blade and upper back, shown in a photo taken from behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Game controller and cartoon characters on a back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows the upper back and shoulder blade of a person wearing a red and white striped top, with their head partly visible at the top left. A black ink tattoo shows a retro game controller with cartoon characters, a mushroom and a small bee-like figure gathered above it. The linework is bold and the fills are solid black with some grey, and the tattoo fills the centre of the frame.

Back Shoulder Cartoon character Mushroom Bee

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dough has been proving since midnight, and you are the only one in the back of Hollin's who can hear it breathe. Flour sits in the creases of your knuckles. On the shelf above the mixer, between a tin of cinnamon and a block of salted butter, your brother's old controller waits with its cord coiled like a sleeping grass snake, the grey plastic gone the colour of weak tea from years of steam.

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Mrs Okafor from the café next door comes through the yard gate at four, carrying a crate of eggs and a question about the sky over the tram sheds. You tell her it is only the rain coming. She does not believe the forecast, and she never has. While she waits for her order she picks up a honey roll you have pressed with a tiny bee in sugar paste and laughs at it, then at the bigger loaf beside it, the one with a fat spotted cap your piping bag made by accident. Her grandson, she says, would eat the lot and ask for another life.

You used to play it on his bedroom carpet all one winter, the two of you racing little cartoon figures through green pipes and across a sky that kept flickering. He always took the bee, because it could fly over the water when the rest of you drowned. He moved south to a flat above a launderette and left the controller behind with a note on the back of a receipt: keep the score warm. You still press the power button on the way past, out of habit, though nothing has been plugged into that box since spring.

At half past five you slide the first trays in. The oven ticks as it heats and the room fills slowly with the smell of bread and warm honey. When the bell over the front door jingles and the first customer stamps in out of the dark, you are already reaching for the next tray, a little lopsided, a little lucky, as if somebody had been waiting for you to be ready.