https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nekdgq/andreas-vrontis-ascii-tattoo-art

Long before Microsoft Paint was embraced as the computer art style of choice by the Tumblr generation, there was art made with the humble ASCII. These artworks are created using only the 95 printable characters from the 1963 American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) standard, which defined how text would be coded on computers.

ASCII art emerged out of necessity as a way to represent images on computer bulletin board systems in the 70s and 80s, but quickly took on a life as an art style in its own right. Today there are vibrant online ASCII art communities and even machine-learning programs that can automatically convert line drawings into ASCII equivalents. Yet for the 31-year-old Cypriot tattoo artist Andreas Vrontis, computer-generated ASCII art just doesn’t cut it when he needs to create a template for his hyper-detailed ASCII tattoos.