An Avengers Tattoo Just Made The Internet Lose Its Mind

Heads up, this article contains major spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War. Consider yourself...Infinity Warn- no wait, we already did that joke.

To celebrate the release of Infinity War, five of the original six members of the Avengers -- Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Hemsworth, and Jeremy Renner -- got themselves matching tattoos. It's a gesture which places them alongside other iconic movie ensembles like the Fellowship of the Ring and, well, the Suicide Squad. As tattoos go, however, it's pretty light in the symbolic department -- just a stylish imagining of the movie's logo, overlaid with the number "6" to signify, well, the six of them.

The internet, however, knew differently. After spending nearly a decade analyzing the MCU for foreshadowing, Easter eggs, and deeper meanings, they saw this tattoo as one final code-breaking challenge for the fandom to solve. It started off relatively sane, with some looking at the design as a complex, interlocking web of references to each character. There was a hammer, an arc reactor, a shield, an arrow, an hourglass, and a big angry monster face.

It then started to get a little weird. Some saw it as foreshadowing that Hawkeye would return in Infinity War 2 to save the day, whilst others suggested that it was a reference to the golden ratio. Someone else looked at the design, meanwhile, and saw a minimalist representation of how the next movie is going to be Sliding Doors, but with superheroes.

It gets crazier. Members of Reddit's r/conspiracy interpreted the slightly pentagram-ish tattoo as a ritualistic occult sigil similar to that "used by black magicians to conjure demons." That's a little worrying, actually. Joss Whedon is looking for a new gig. Speaking of, do we even need to say that someone brought up the Illuminati?

This tattoo might currently be the internet's equivalent of a magic eye picture book, albeit one written by Alex Jones, but everyone's reaction is a bizarrely heartwarming testament to the strange, obsessive, amazing fandom that these movies have built up over the years. On the other hand, it's a little disconcerting that the "demons are everywhere" crowd has jumped on the bandwagon. It's only a small leap from here to questioning what was really going on in the basement of that shawarma place.

Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook! He also has a newsletter about depressing history, but that's only for the coolest kids.

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