Colour tattoo of Mario from the Super Mario games on an upper arm, with a question block, mushroom, green pipe and piranha plant against a blue sky.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mario scene on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows Mario in his red cap and blue overalls, standing on a green warp pipe with a question block, a red spotted mushroom and a piranha plant around him. The scene sits against a blue sky with cartoon clouds and rolling brown hills. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth, with bright, saturated colour throughout.

Upper arm Mushroom Cloud Video game Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Day 212 of the Thaw Survey. The hills outside Brackenmere still roll the way the old maps show them, brown and bald under a sky the sensors insist is blue. Today we dug out a pipe, green as a bottle, standing up out of the turf as if it had been waiting for someone to ask it a question.

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Oduya found a block nearby with a question mark painted on one face, the paint gone soft as butter. She wanted to break it open. I reminded her of the rule: nothing gets broken until the hoard is logged. She sulked for an hour, then pulled a red cap out of the pipe's mouth, faded at the brim, with a white badge stitched on the front. She put it on her head like she had won a race.

The mushroom was the strangest find. Red, spotted white, as tall as my knee. When the cleaning drone passed over it, the spots lit faintly and it hummed. Dr Ferrall says it is a signal relay. I think somebody left it as a joke for us. Down the slope, half buried in the mud, a snapping plant with teeth like a broken comb waits without moving, however many times we bait it with a boot.

Last entry before the lamp dies. The painted sky on the wall of the old hut has the same clouds, puffed and round as cartoon cotton. Whoever made them knew the sky would outlast everything else. I have logged the block's question under unresolved: who was the man who kept leaping up to hit it? Oduya says he was a plumber. I say he was a hero. We agreed to disagree, and I went to bed.