Two pixel art Super Mario tattoos in red, blue and skin tones, one larger on a calf and a smaller one on the other leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pixel art Mario tattoos on calves

Calf · Colour · Photo

Two pixel art tattoos of the video game character Mario sit on two lower legs, with the larger figure on the left leg in a running pose and a smaller figure on the right leg. The blocky pixel linework is solid, with flat fills in red, blue, brown and skin tones. The tattoos are shown against a wooden floor and a white wall, with the figures placed on the calves.

Calf Pixel art

Find an artist for this

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

Pavel had drawn the little plumber forty-one times on squared paper before the arcade owner agreed he could be left alone with the cabinet's board. The sprite was no taller than a thumbnail on the screen, so every pixel mattered, and Pavel counted them out loud the way his nan used to count stitches. Red cap, four across. Brown hair under it, two rows down. Blue overalls, the buttons a single bright square each.

Keep reading

The cabinet stood in the back room of the Ship and Anchor in Grimsby, between a dartboard with a split wire and a fruit machine that paid out only in loose change. Nobody played the old game any more except Mrs Okonedo's grandsons on Saturdays, and they always ran the plumber to the far end of the first world, jumping the same gap until it became a kind of prayer. Pavel watched them from the bar with a pint going flat.

On the last Saturday of March the boys lost. The screen went grey, a tune played that nobody in the room had heard before, and the little figure paused at the edge of the pipe, looked over its shoulder, and ran. Not on the screen. Across the carpet, past the dartboard, out through the propped door into the car park where fog had come in off the Humber. Pavel found its footprints in the wet tarmac, each one a neat square of light.

He followed them to the harbour wall, where the plumber sat on a bollard, one hand on its cap. "You can't leave the game until someone finishes it," it said. "Nobody finishes anything any more." Pavel sat down beside it, took out his graph paper, and began drawing the last world one square at a time, until the fog thinned and the sun came up pink over the water.