hi! do you have any headcanons about how to tattoo a phoenix? i keep thinking that it must have been an effort to get any ink stay on marco, who likely really really wanted that tat :O
yeah wahoo okay we’ve essentially got three, maybe four possibilities right: seawater, seastone, haki, or a potential fruit power for permanent marking
1) seawater
uh so i am passionate about dunking fruit users in seawater and operating on them in there, and also making fruit users drink seawater before doing shit to them lololol, cc: skinning & fireplay. Tattooing in seawater though 1) doesn’t seem particularly painful and 2) is definitely not sanitary, neither of which is very sexy. you can get marco to chug some seawater before tattooing though! I imagine he’d have to bracket out a month of healing time, during which he’d just have to keep consuming seawater so the tattoo heals naturally into his skin. Once it’s healed the phoenix flames won’t react to it!
2) seastone
it seems thoroughly possible for there to be black sand beaches composed of seastone sediments that fruit users can’t step on. we can assign seastone to be a mineral pigment in this form lmfao and have commerce potential. tattoo ink for fruit users!!! If there’s a sailor culture among the Marines too it might be somewhat legitimated, but it’s more likely more of a black market commodity that the Whitebeards can easily get their hands on~
buuuut ofc the problem with this is, if physical contact with handcuffs or prison bars is enough to drain Luffy completely, then putting seastone ink under your skin might really just fuck you up for life oops. oh shit the even darker version of this is, if the Marines want to seal your power semi-permanently they can just use this pigmented ink on you. Then you’d have to literally cut or sear it all off to regain your fruit powers.
3) haki
so jury’s still out on how haki affects marco... ‘cause it can injure him, but the phoenix will literally just heal him again...? my take on this was okay, haki injuries take him longer to heal, and compounded haki injuries still have the potential to seriously hurt or kill him. soooo i don’t know if this method would work on marco (it’d work on Ace tho). maybe if it’s really specific haki?? maybe if it’s from a very specific haki artisan?? artisanal haki?
4) fruit powers
sharpie sharpie no mi
here we’ll tag some great thinkers of the OP world & see what they think: @midnightluck @authenticaussi3 @chromiwrites @leviathiane @prussian-lullaby @manadebutt @hergan416 @trixree
