It’s a me, Mario and I’m a gonna be a tattoo! 

Who doesn’t love Mario? I’m not saying I was a latchkey kid, but I definitely spent more quality time with the 8-bit plumber/questionable Italian stereotype than I ever did with my parents. I was part of a generation raised by the television, and when there wasn’t anything good on (which happened to be most of the time) you can be damned sure that I’d be playing Nintendo. 

The first game I ever fell in love with was, naturally, the original “Super Mario Bros.” The side-scrolling adventure was unlike anything I had ever seen before, there were so many different ways to play the game. The levels didn’t just change slightly, they were wildly different. Some times you were underground, other times you were flying and on the hardest levels (at least for me) you were trying to swim without running into some evil triangular squid. It wasn’t just that the levels were different, but you could take very different paths through each level. I know this sounds like nothing special when you consider the massive environment in a game like Fortnite, but this shit blew our minds.

From the early 1980s through the year 2000, Nintendo churned out an insane amount of legendary games. It may sound crazy now, but there was a major Hollywood film (“The Wizard”) that people went to go see almost entirely so they could get a glimpse of “Super Mario Bros. 3” before it was released. Yes, I know it sounds insane, but it happened. And when we saw Mario as a raccoon taking flight, well, we lost our collective shit. 

Part of what made this classic era of Nintendo so intriguing was the variety of the games. There were side-scroller adventures (“Metroid,” “Contra,” “Castlevania”), sports games (“Tecmo Bowl,” “Blades of Steel,” “Punch-Out”), puzzle games (“Tetris,” “Dr. Mario”), role-playing games (“Final Fantasy”) and so many other types of games. I haven’t even mentioned frickin’ Zelda! Or Super Nintendo and “Donkey Kong Country!” 

Look, I know you’re here for the tattoos and not my words, so let’s get to that gallery that is going to include tattoos that cover the full breadth of Nintendo’s ouevre. Enjoy!