Colour tattoo of a blocky, pixel-style rainbow on the upper arm, just below the sleeve of a dark grey T-shirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pixel rainbow on an upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A stepped, pixelated rainbow arc in red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple sits on the outer upper arm of a person wearing a dark grey T-shirt. Each band is built from square blocks with hard edges rather than smooth curves, giving a retro video game look. The rainbow is centred on a plain skin background, with the sleeve cropping the top of the frame.

Upper arm Rainbow Arc

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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 cabinet arrived above the Pier Arcade in a van that smelled of wet sand, and Ruth Ferreira had it under her skylight before the driver finished his tea. Someone had gutted the side panel and left the monitor cracked across one corner. On the attract screen, though, a rainbow still climbed out of the grey, built from square blocks, red at the top and violet at the base, each step as hard-edged as a sweet wrapper. Nobody had drawn a curve in that game. It was all stairs.

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The manual, folded inside the coin box, explained that the rainbow was meant to be a placeholder. Colin Pryce, who coded the thing in a damp unit off the A38, had planned to replace it with a proper arc before the cabinet shipped, but the deadline came first. Thirty-seven years of children had fed it fifty pence pieces precisely because it was wrong and lovely at once. Ruth read that twice and put the kettle on.

She spent three nights on the capacitors and a blown fuse. On the fourth, the screen woke with a hum like a fridge settling, the blocks pulsed, and a little ship slid into view underneath, firing at grey invaders dropping out of the sky. She played until the gulls started up outside, missing every shot, laughing at the stepped edges of everything she touched.

Dev came back at nine with a clipboard and asked what she had done. She pointed at the rainbow. He squinted at it for a long time. She packed the cabinet into the van with the arc still glowing on its screen, and on the masking tape across the front she wrote in capitals: DO NOT SMOOTH.