Two of Avogado6’s illustrations: a body with batteries removed, and a sleeper “charging” alongside a phone.
Avogado6 is a Japanese illustrator, known online by that name, whose pictures turn ordinary pressures such as school, office work, family expectations, loneliness and phones into short, wordless visual metaphors. A typical image is clean and simply coloured, often grey with a single accent of red or blue, and holds a quiet scene with one impossible detail: a socket in someone’s back, a cage under a skirt, flowers growing from a head. The artist shares work on Twitter, and this gallery collects 35 of the best-known pieces.
Many of these images deal with depression, burnout, bullying and suicide, and some show blood. They are artworks rather than statements of fact, and they are popular because so many people recognise their own experiences in them. The notes under each picture describe what is drawn and suggest one possible reading, but the artist rarely explains the images, and other interpretations are just as valid.
Tired bodies: work, devices and exhaustion
A person lies under the covers with a power socket built into their back, plugged into the same extension lead as their phone. Both are “recharging” overnight, a simple image of a body treated like a device that must be ready again by morning.
Huge red figures loom over an office worker slumped across a desk under towering stacks of paper. Japan has a word for death from overwork, karōshi, and the image reads as a portrait of the pressure behind it.
A man steps through a bright doorway under a green emergency exit sign, briefcase dropped, while a crowd of identical commuters stays in the dark. Leaving, quitting or escaping a routine is shown as both a relief and a lonely act.
A collapsed office worker lies on the floor, coloured cables spilling out of an opening in their back, shoes kicked off and briefcase nearby. The person is drawn as a machine that has broken down.
A man bends double, his upper body draped in a melting white shape with horns. Exhaustion and something monstrous seem to be hanging on his back.
A snarling lion is drawn with its ribs hollowed out, a red glow inside the empty chest. A symbol of strength becomes a picture of something running on empty.
A naked figure is curled up inside an open fridge, cold air drifting out. It is a quiet picture of withdrawal: shutting yourself away to feel nothing.
Hospital beds stand in a sunny ward, with grass and plants growing through the empty sheets. It suggests time passing, people gone, and nature quietly taking over.
Masks, roles and the face we show others
A smiling figure pours red liquid from a blender into a long line of glasses, while a red tally mark glows on their chest. One reading: someone serving out their own energy, or their pain, cheerfully and endlessly to other people.
A schoolgirl in a sailor uniform, with a class-representative armband, sits on a stairwell smoking, her glasses taken off and set beside her. The contrast suggests the gap between the role expected of her and how she feels in private.
A person at a bathroom sink holds a blank, smiling mask, while the mirror shows their real, tired face. Masks recur in the artist’s work as a symbol of the cheerful face people put on for others.
A figure with a mass of red camellias blooming from their head, petals and red streaks running down their face, presses a finger to their lips. Beauty and injury are combined, with a gesture that asks for silence.
Wrapped in red string strung with glowing bulbs, a grinning character looks festive, until you notice the red cords are tied into their own body. Happiness on display and harm underneath, in a single picture.
A young man with his shirt open shows a mechanical device in place of a heart, holding a real, bloody heart in his hand. It is a bleak image of switching feelings off in order to function.
A headless figure in a white shirt holds their own upturned head, from which a bunch of blue flowers is growing. Something beautiful is growing out of what has been lost, depending on how you read it.
A smiling woman in a grand gown has a cage built into her skirt, with a child sitting inside it. It is a striking image of a controlling parent, or a role that hides someone trapped within.
Two people hug tightly, but one has cracks in their head and wiring showing from their arm. Comfort and damage exist together in the same embrace.
Pressure from other people
A pale figure is gripped by dozens of red arms reaching from every direction, one hand on their face and another at their throat. It is a strong image of being pulled apart by demands, expectations or other people’s needs.
A child sits in a barrel pierced with blades, surrounded by a ring of red figures each holding a sword. The setup resembles a popular toy game in which players take turns inserting swords into a barrel, and here it becomes an image of group bullying.
A boy with a watering can stands beneath giant Venus flytraps that are swallowing small human figures. One reading: someone patiently nourishing the very thing that consumes other people.
Workers in blue walk through a factory lined with battery cages full of identical blue birds. The image works as a comment on factory farming and equally on people kept in rows at work or school.
A child cries with mouth open as many dark hands grab at their hair, face and chest, where a red heart glows. Pressure is drawn as an endless crowd of hands.
A figure with a blazing sun for a head stands over a kneeling figure whose head is a cratered moon, holding a baseball bat. The image can be read as a story of one bright, dominant personality overpowering a quieter one.
A woman stares at her phone at a pedestrian crossing while the small child holding her hand looks up at her. The green light is on, but neither moves. It is an everyday scene of distraction, drawn without judgement but hard to forget.
A small child hangs by red strings tied to the little fingers of a light hand and a dark hand. Many viewers see it as a child caught between two parents, a reading that matches the red-thread motif elsewhere in the series.
A child pulls on red strings hanging from a giant hand above, like a puppet trying to work its own controls. In East Asian folklore a red thread links people who are fated to meet, which gives the strings a double meaning.
Despair, death and dark humour
In front of a mirror, a figure with angel wings and a halo straightens their hair, while behind them a pair of bare feet hang beside an empty chair and shoes set neatly on the floor. The picture places suicide just outside the frame of a hopeful-looking scene, and is among the most painful in the collection.
A student in uniform crouches in a narrow beam of light beneath a long row of red nooses, schoolbag dropped beside them. Read as a picture of despair at school, it shows how close and how many the dark thoughts can feel to a young person.
A boy lies wounded on the ground while an angel crouches beside him, opening cases of halos in different shapes. The scene can be read as dark humour about choosing an afterlife, or as a comment on how death is romanticised.
From behind, a person scratches their head, which is full of holes like a cheese with mice living inside. It turns forgetfulness or mental exhaustion into a literal, slightly comic picture.
A grey-haired figure holds their head in their hands while a red insect crawls out of their ear. It turns an intrusive thought, the kind that will not go away, into something physical.
A naked figure lies on a white floor while a stem of dark flowers grows out of a hole where their head should be. As with several of these images, it can be read as grief or depression taking root.
On a red background, a pale figure sits in a pool of water spilling from a microwave, cutting at a tangle of red string with scissors. The domestic objects make the distress feel ordinary and close.
And a few lighter moments
Not everything is dark. The artist also draws everyday comedy, often involving animals.
Someone works at a desk while cats climb over the chair, the monitor, the computer tower and the person’s shoulders. It is one of the gentlest images in the set and needs no explanation for anyone who has tried to work with a cat at home.
A boy is pulled along the ground by four Shiba Inu-type dogs on red leads, his sandals scraping. A rare lighthearted image that anyone who has walked an excited dog will recognise.
Why these illustrations hit so hard
Avogado6 works in a tradition of visual metaphor that runs through editorial cartoons and surrealist art: take a feeling that is hard to describe, and show it as a physical object. The visual language is deliberately sparse, with neutral backgrounds, few colours and no text, so the viewer fills in the story. Recurring motifs, such as masks, red strings, cables and empty uniforms, build a vocabulary that fans learn to read across many pictures.
The themes also have real-world context. Japan coined the term karōshi for death from overwork, and karōjisatsu for suicide linked to work stress; the World Health Organization and International Labour Organization estimated that 745,194 deaths worldwide in 2016 were attributable to long working hours. The red thread that appears in several images comes from Chinese folklore, in which an invisible red cord, managed by the matchmaker deity Yue Lao, ties together people destined to meet; in Japanese versions it is tied to the little finger.
If some of these pictures feel uncomfortably close to home, you are not alone, and it is worth talking to someone you trust or to a doctor. Local crisis lines are available in most countries for anyone having thoughts of suicide.
Sources: Avogado6 on Twitter; Wikipedia: Karōshi; Wikipedia: Red thread of fate.
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