So a player from our gaming group asked me to help him get a new tattoo – my job was to compile a composite from his source material to a form the actual artist can work with. He asked me to do that about a year and a half ago. Well, now it’s out of my hands, and as suspected, that’s a good feeling. And kind of weird one at the same time. The stuff I tinkered with will eventually find form on someone else’s skin. There is something near-sacred about that. My own view on tattoos is on some level close to semi-mystical reverence. Things etched on the skin telling a truth more deep than all the clothes and mannerisms out there. My father still wears the “Sailor’s Shallow Grave” tattoo on his arm, even if he hasn’t been sailing the high seas in years. He’s not exactly proudly presenting it to people, but it’s something he’ll have for life and no amount of suburbanizing will take that aspect of his life away from him. Of course there are stupid tattoos (although some behind that link are really awesome), I’d love to think that quite a good portion of people, when selecting a tattoo, attach some meaning to it.

So when in RPGs someone has a tattoo, it’s quite sad for me to see what it’s usually there for.here seems to be three typical possibilities why it’s there. 1) It’s cool. “The mysterious stranger has this awesome tattoo of a thundercloud on his face that is so fetch” 2) It’s magical “The mysterious stranger’s tattoo shoots a burst of salami at you” or 3) it’s to mark the wearer as a part of a group “The mysterious stranger’s thundercloud tattoo means he’s part of the thunderous pasta chefs’ ninja-pirate group”

It’s very rare to see a tattoo in RPGs (both in sourcebooks or actual games) that’s there beyond those reasons. In other media tattoos that are there for the character instead of for the story somehow aren’t that uncommon anymore (Battlestar Galactica‘s the first that comes to mind). But not in RPGs, really. For example, in the d20 Future campaign I’m currently playing, two or three of the characters have high profile tattoos, and if I recall correctly, all of them are of type 2. And any tattoo we’ve come across on NPCs have been of type 3. Maybe some of them have started as Type 1s, but moved to the group identity thing quite fast. None outside that.

I try to recall my own campaigns, but can’t come up with many that had tattoos in them outside the “Look at Me, I’m Important” -sphere. I ran a campaign called Käärmeuurna (Snake Urn) that had a minor theme of body modification in it. I think there might have been a character with a tattoo that wasn’t there because it was important or especially cool. But most likely I’m lying if I’m saying that. I do vaguely recall that one of the player characters getting a non-uniform, not-just-for-cool, non-magical tattoo in that very game, but that might have been something she was planning on getting, not really sure if she really actually got it. Closest to getting a normal, character-based tattoo on any game so-far, I think.

The sad thing is that having a tattoo on a character quite easily falls into the superficial cool side instead of anything else. Might be time to actively change that in the next campaign I run. And in case one or more of the people in our gaming group are reading this, I’ll ask you: Have we had regular, “human” tattoos in our games?