Colour tattoo of an NES controller with Super Mario mushrooms, Boo, a Goomba, a Bob-omb, a fire flower and a Yoshi egg across the upper chest and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Nintendo controller and Super Mario items on chest

Chest · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a grey NES controller with a red Nintendo logo, with Super Mario items and characters arranged above it, including mushrooms, a Goomba, Boo, a Bob-omb, a fire flower, a star and a Yoshi egg. The linework is bold and clean with flat colour fills and small areas of shading on the controller. Red, green, yellow and white accents sit against the grey and black, and the design is framed by the shoulder and collarbone area of a bare-skinned upper body.

Chest Mushroom Star Video game

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The grey controller came up in the tender's supply crate, wrapped in last week's shipping forecast, with a note in Tomas's capitals: LAMP FIRST, THEN THE TELLY. You had no telly, only the spare Nintendo he'd left in the store with a cable frayed at one end. You plugged it into the generator's side socket at the start of the night watch and let the lens turn above you like a slow clock.

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The game wanted you to jump. Mushrooms raised you a head's height, the star made you untouchable for a few bright seconds, and a Bob-omb marched at you with its fuse lit until you pushed it into a Goomba and watched the smoke drift off. The fire flower you saved for fog. When the sea came in thick off Carrack Dhu and the horn sounded every thirty seconds, you played by the lamp's sweep alone, counting its turns so you never mistook the reef for open water.

One night a small boat's deck lights wandered in toward the Shelf. The radio on the gallery had died in January, and you couldn't leave the lens without losing the beam, so you tapped the lamp shutter in the rhythm of the coin chime, short, short, long. The lights stopped, swung, and answered in the same beat. Two minutes later they were heading for the harbour mouth, and you were still counting turns.

The tender brought Tomas's replacement the following Tuesday, a lad from Penzance who eyed the controller as if it might bite. You left it on the shelf beside the logbook, the red B button worn pale by your thumb, and wrote one line under the last entry: Boo is shy in fog, mind him.