Colour tattoo of the green Yoshi character from Nintendo holding a large crayon, with script reading Life is a work of art on the upper text.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yoshi holding a crayon with script quote

Other · Colour · Photo

A green Yoshi character from Nintendo's video games stands beside an oversized orange and white crayon, with a small outlined shape to the right. Script lettering above reads "Life is a work of art" and below reads "you've just got to paint it colorful". Soft shading gives the figure volume, with bright colours and a thin red line beneath it on a pale skin background.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marguerite had been asked to repaint the bus shelters on Harrow Road by eleven, and at half past ten the only colour in the whole street was the sodium glow on wet pavement. She sat on the kerb with a flask of tea gone lukewarm and a crayon the length of her forearm, its paper wrapper long since torn off. Her little green dinosaur, the one she had carried in her coat since she was nine, sat on her knee and stared at the grey shutters of the closed bakery as though it had opinions about them.

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"You can't do the whole street," she told it. "The council wants beige."

The dinosaur tapped its foot against her knee, which it had never done before, and she decided that counted as a yes. She stood, pressed the crayon to the first shutter and drew a single long stripe, orange at the tip, and the paint came off in a warm rush that smelled of wax and cut grass. Behind her a fox trotted out from under a van, paused, and sat down to watch.

By dawn there were thirty-one stripes, a shutter painted sunflower yellow, and a red loop round the bus stop that the driver swore had not been there when he parked. The inspector arrived at seven with his clipboard and his beige samples. He looked at the dinosaur, which was now perched on the shelter roof, then at the stripes, and said nothing at all for a long time.

Then he asked whether she had any spare green.