Full sleeve neo-traditional tattoo on an upper arm showing cartoon video game motifs including a floating character, clouds, a question block, a green pipe and a piranha plant.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Video game sleeve tattoo on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder with cartoon video game imagery, including a floating round character, clouds, a yellow question block, a green pipe and a red piranha plant. The bold dark outlines and flat, solid fills give it a clean, illustrative look. The palette is bright and mostly pastel, set against a pale blue sky background within the design.

Neo-trad Upper arm Video game Cartoon character Cloud Pipe Mushroom Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been told the pipe under Saltcombe Quay was only for rainwater, so when the harbour began to drain on a Tuesday she sent her brother down the ladder with a wrench and a flask of tea. He came back up an hour later with soot on his cheeks and a question block tucked under one arm, a yellow box the size of a bread loaf, its face blinking with a sort of patient hope.

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"It wants answering," he said. "Before it'll let the water go back."

Nell read the question, scratched into the box in neat capitals: WHICH WAY DOES THE SKY RUN WHEN NOBODY IS LOOKING? She didn't know, so she went to the mushroom woman at the fish market, who sold dried caps by weight and had opinions about everything. The mushroom woman laughed until she coughed, then said the sky ran downhill, same as everything, only slower, and that was why the clouds kept coming in off the water.

The answer must have been right, because the pipe groaned, and a round puffball of a creature drifted out of the top of it, pink and furious, puffing its cheeks at a gull. Behind it came a clump of cloud, then the red bloom of a piranha plant rising on its stalk, jaws snapping at nothing, and the whole harbour lifted a foot on the tide and settled again.

Nell's brother never went down the ladder again. He kept the question block on the windowsill, where it blinks each evening at the sea, and every so often someone on the quay asks it something new.