Tattooing in the Barony

 

This post is dedicated to the lovely Semiurge. 

Tattooing in the Barony is not commonly practiced - the art is associated with the nomads from the south, and visible tattoos will mark you as a foreigner. There are a couple of notable exceptions to this; the most common and visible are the mercenary fighter cults. 

These groups are semi-secret societies within mercenary companies - in the south of the Barony, near to the border, many of them practice something that they call 'enlightened chivalry', a type of appropriation and admixture of nomadic moral tenets, tied to questing, artistic and poetical practice, and the protection of the weak and defenceless. The members of these fighter cults swear oaths to one another, and are forbidden from marrying or bearing children. They go 'questing' together in small groups while the mercenary company are out of work or billeted, and the more philosophical among them will have lots to say (and often lots to write) about how pragmatism should always be tempered by idealism. 

Nomads tattoo their bodies for all sorts of reasons - with maps of the heavens and waterways, with great deeds and bonds of fealty, with marks of great wealth, honourable conduct, and good legal standing. Nomads tend to have a mutable fluency with tattooed imagery, and take pride in striking or unexpected compositions and pairings. The mercenaries have a more culturally Baronial approach, and their tattoos tend to be more formally codified in discreet pictographic 'languages' - the sun on the belly for a leader, a bramble crown for one who speaks with invisible things, birds for marksmen, snakes for Arditi, etc. Mercenaries are like pop stars in Baronial polite society, and these barbarous affectations are broadly tolerated and even celebrated.

The other exception is religious. There are academic heretics who contend that, when the mind is brought into the Material Heaven, so too is the body, in the exact state it was in when it died. Since the Heaven is perpetual, they believe that anything committed to the 'text' of the eternal body is preserved for all time. These poor fools tattoo whatever they think deserves to survive in perpetuity this way - what they personally identify as the most important sentences, equations, diagrams etc. for passage into the future. Some of them also have an unsavoury habit of forcibly tattooing the soon-to-die, viewing their ailing bodies as priceless time capsules into the infinite. 

The actual specifics of the tattoos tend towards the saccharine and over-personal. Particularly abject specimens have crossed out and inked over sections of text; evidence of embarrassment over texts that they once thought profound. Unlike most heretical academics, body-writers are actively despised by both the church and general population, and are often stoned or beaten to death in the streets when discovered.