Woman has to hide her pre-Covid tattoo

And other stories from the stranger side of life

Mask tattoo
(Image credit: TikTok)

A woman who got tattoo early last year says she has worn long sleeves for the past 12 months because the Covid-19 pandemic means it could be misinterpreted. Early last year, before coronavirus spread around the world, TikTok user Leah got the tattoo which says: “Courageously and radically refuse to wear a mask.” She said the ink “basically means being true to yourself and real and not pretending to be something you’re not” but now covers it up, in case people misinterpret it as a message about Covid prevention.

Brain-eating worm was actually sticky tape

A mother thought she had pulled a four-inch worm from her eight-year-old son’s brain but later discovered it was sticky tape. Gemma Tyson said she “felt sick” as she tweezed out a long, sticky item that “just kept coming and coming” from her son Ashton’s ear. She thought he had worms “eating his brain” but doctors told her it was a ball of surgical tape Ashton had stuffed in his ear a week earlier.

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Pokemon cards could sell for £100,000

A collection of Pokemon cards is expected to sell for £100,000 at an auction today. International prices for Pokemon have soared in recent years - a sealed First Edition Booster box recently went for £298,000. Auctioneer Richard Winterton said: “Pokemon is quite simply a global sensation and the ultimate ‘new’ collectable - we expect huge interest across the globe, especially collectors in Japan, China and the USA.”

 
Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.