Two forearms with matching colour pixel art tattoos of video game style characters, each with a red pixel heart above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pixel art game characters and hearts on forearms

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two forearms are shown side by side, each carrying a pixel art tattoo of a character with a red pixel heart above it. The left figure has blonde hair and pink and blue clothing, and the right figure wears a green cap and tunic, with both drawn in a blocky, stepped outline. The colours are bright and saturated against the skin, and the patterned fabric behind the arms sits softly out of focus.

Forearm Pixel art Heart

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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

Dear Tomasz, you will think I have lost my mind, but the customs man at Ferrenbach turned my bag inside out and found nothing but the cartridge I had wrapped in my spare jumper. He held it up under the strip light, squinted at the little green figure on the label, and said, "My nephew had this one." Then he waved me through without asking a single question about the cash.

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I have been thinking about that all the way down the motorway. Your drawing from last spring, the one with the blocky heart in the corner of the page, you never finished it, and I kept the graph paper. Every square is the same size, so nothing can be wobbly or half meant. You said a pixel can only be on or off, which is a poor way to talk about people, but a good way to draw a hero.

Last night in the bus shelter on Keller Road I sketched the whole thing in biro on the back of a ticket, squares counted twice, and then I found a parlour down an alley that smelled of disinfectant and burnt sugar. The woman with the silver ring in her eyebrow said the red heart would need two passes to hold its colour, and I believed her because she had three of them of her own. When she asked who the second figure was for, I said it was for a boy who once carried a princess through a flooded cellar and never complained about the water.

I have drawn the heart again on the corner of this envelope so you can see it. It is the only shape I am certain of. Write to the poste restante in Ferrenbach and tell me which way the hero is facing, because I have never once been able to tell from the picture.