Aspiring tattoo artists take note! The character design team over at Pandemic has been snorting Pixy Stix out of each other's navels for the past three days, and they are tired. And if there's one thing I've learned at Kotaku Headquarters in the few weeks I've been here, it's that only through great adversity (and vageuly homoerotic sugar bingeing), are great gaming ideas born.

To spare their delicate artists further trauma, Pandemic Studios has launched a contest to decide what will be indelibly poked into main mercenary Mattias' arms:

For the upcoming Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, Pandemic Studios is calling for their fans to contribute to the design of the lead character, Mattias Nilsson. In "Design the Ink" - the current Mercenaries 2 contest - Pandemic is currently accepting original tattoo designs for the lead Mercenary. The winner will have his or her name featured in the credits and Mattias will actually wear the winning design in the final released version of the game!

Shut down that pirated copy of Illustrator, no tribal designs are being accepted! Also on the "no" list are nudity, profanity, or copyrighted works. So that charming rendering of Samus, in dishabille, dropping a fat f-bomb in a speech bubble, will just have to remain in your My Pictures folder a trifle longer. Very sorry. Eliza Gauger

Design the Ink Contest [Mercenaries II site]

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