Video games inspire a lot of tattoos – but what are the world’s most-inked games?

In this line of work there’s a lot of things that are almost guaranteed: constant harassment from sweaty gamer nerds mad because you said one bad thing about The Witcher 3, it’s awfully middle-class and last but not least, at least someone has a tattoo inspired by video games. That’s just like, the three common rules of being a video game journalist, I’m afraid.

Jokes, but not really jokes, aside, there’s a lot of tattoos around the world that have been inspired by video games. Hell, even as I write this I’m thinking of just which tattoo I’d like to grab next from my recent obsession, Dead by Daylight. I mean, there’s a lot of options isn’t there and who doesn’t want to shack up with The Trapper by placing him on your left boob?

ANYWAY. There’s a lot of video games and there’s a lot of tattoos. But what are the world’s most-inked games in the first place? Is it something like Overwatch or Fortnite? Well, you’ll be surprised to know that neither of those games even scrape the top 10 of the most-inked video games in the world according to a study based on Instagram. Not even remotely close.

In fact the study lists the following 10 video game series as the most-inked games via Instagram:

• Pokemon

• The Legend of Zelda

• Super Mario

• Kingdom Hearts

• Final Fantasy

• God of War

• BioShock

• Fallout

• The Witcher

• Halo

I admit that I’m shocked that not even Overwatch made it on here, especially as so many people fell in love with the characters and their designs when the game was first revealed. But I’m not at all surprised to see that the top game is Pokemon either, a game that, despite its controversies throughout the past couple of years, still owns the hearts and souls of so many gamers out there. It’s clear that considering it has thrice as many tattoo posts on Instagram, Pokemon still reigns supreme!

What makes this doubly amusing to me though is the fact that the top three games are all Nintendo-based, showing that Nintendo really do have some dedicated fans out there.

The study didn’t just look at just a video games series, though. It also focused on video games and their protagonists – or even mascot characters. For example Pikachu from Pokemon.

According to the study below, these are the top video game protagonists or mascots that people have got tattoos of. Some might surprise you as much as they surprised me!

• Pikachu

• Mario

• Kratos

• Crash Bandicoot

• Sonic the Hedgehog

• Chun-Li

• Yoshi

• Pac-Man

• Spyro

• Kirby

To read the full study for yourself, as well as see just how many people have tattooed themselves with Pikachu, click here to find out more.

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