An adorable image of a young caped crusader combing the aisles at a hardware store with his superhero daddy that’s gone viral in the last few days hails from Canada.

Because of the caption -- “I know a good dad when I see one” -- some viewers have assumed the shot was snapped by a stranger who just happened to spot the crime-fighting duo shopping.

But it turns out the picture was taken in Toronto by the little superhero‘s mom, who‘s been stunned by how quickly the image has made its made around the world.

She’s agreed to tell CTVNews.ca the story behind the snap, but insists she doesn’t want to reveal her secret identity.

The mom says she snapped the picture as her son, "F", and her husband were shopping for odds and ends at their local Home Depot. F’s outfit that day, she says, was not unlike the one he wears almost every day.

“F just turned 3 years old and looooves superheroes and capes. He puts capes on everything,” she explained by email, noting he’ll even drape one over the shampoo bottle in the bath to give it a more superhero feel.

The cape F is wearing was made by his mom for his 3rd birthday party a few weeks ago. Since the party, F wears his cape “almost 100 per cent of the time when we're at home", his mom says.

With the recent birth of F’s baby sister -- a future crime-fighter herself, no doubt -- F and his daddy have been spending more time together, she says. “They are like two peas in a pod.”

But recently, F asked his father, "Daddy, where's YOUR cape?" That’s when they decided that Dad should have a cape too.

“So I used some extra material from the birthday capes and quickly cut one” for ‘B,’ her husband.

F loved it and said, “I'm a little superhero, and you're a big superhero!’"

When the mini-crime fighter’s mom posted the pic on Reddit five days ago, she assumed it would get buried in all the other content on the site.

“I was just looking to provide a few people with a laugh,” she says.

The family went out for a few hours afterwards, and when they got back, they found it had been viewed and commented on thousands of times.

“We couldn't believe it. And it hasn't stopped since,” she says.

It’s been on The Huffington Post, made the rounds on Twitter and even former Star Trek actor George Takei posted it to his Facebook page, which has more than 3.4 million followers.

“Since the photo was taken, all our friends and family have been contacting us to tell us that they saw it here or there,” the Toronto mom says.

As for superhero dad, he is reportedly unfazed by all the attention that both he and the pic are getting, with the mom saying the moment the photo captured was really “just B being B.”

Though the picture hasn’t stopped its journey on the Internet, the family knows where they’re going to post the picture next.

“We are going to print a poster-sized version of the picture and put it above F’s bed,” she says.