This could be verging into spoiler territory BUT!! I’m going to ask anyway cause I can’t get the image out of my head
Will Theo be getting anymore Viking tattoos?? I keep imagining him with rings of glowing tattoos running up his forearms
It’d be so cool to see him use some old Viking combat magic
Also I think Harry might spontaneously combust
YES 👏 YES YES YES There will be tattoos!!!!! Ugh you're right this is verging into spoiler territory so I'll slip it into a read-more (also I have concept pics, this could be long).
So, I've mentioned before that Theo had lots of scars. In Chapter 7, this exchange happens...
“Theo?” Blaise asked quietly. “Are all those scars from your father?”
“Most of them,” he admitted. "A few of them I did to myself."
(emphasis added by me right now)
Okay, so, I am still noodling on the exact logic of this magic, but just as Severus's Dark Mark was a tattoo that looked quite a bit different from the scar it came from, I am planning to turn some of Theo's scars into magical tattoos. Especially the ones he did to himself.
Magic in BOTL is extremely visceral. It comes from the spirit, the soul, or from flesh and blood. Theo's family, his father's side in particular, are extremely adept wielders of flesh-and-blood type magic. Dark Arts, of course - secrets passed down from their ancestors (the vikings), refined over time through various conflicts and wars. In a magical House where deceit and trickery and murder have often been used to wrestle control over the Library, being individually powerful enough to defeat any enemy would have been like an evolutionary trait for any survivors.
And so, the scars that Theo has hidden across his body - some of them are from practicing magic with his father that hurt him now, because he's young and not quite strong enough to wield it, but eventually when he becomes a master of a certain family of spells, that scar would turn into a tattoo.
Family of spells you say? Leeemur you have never mentioned such a thing in BOTL!. Yes, because it doesn't meet my rule I call the "John Rule" which is that, if John would find the explanation boring, it doesn't go in the story hahahahahaha. But basically, my thesis is that if dark magic is really just obscure/secret magic, then Theo is basically an apprentice in his family's particular group of spell families that they have perfected or at least worked on over time that other people would not know about, or at least not know as much about.
I have not fully fleshed out family classes (and probably won't ever have a comprehensive encyclopedia of them but I'll have more on this soon)
But take, for example, Blood Magic. We can narrow this down to Runework of the Flesh (working name). Theo is extremely talented at Runes, and within runes he is really, really good at runework that has to do with blood, bodies, etc. His and other people's. In order to be good at that, though, you'd need to get used to cutting yourself to get some blood that you can use hence where...some of his self-inflicted scars come from.
They are not self-harm scars, it would be one scar (in this case I am thinking on his upper ribs) that, whenever he does blood-based runework, he speaks a spell that tears open that wound and takes blood from that particular part of his skin. One day, when he fully masters that branch of magic, that scar will transform into a tattoo like...one of these, perhaps...
For the forearm one here, I just love the swirling black hole circle effect. Beautiful! The one addition I would be sure to make, though, is adding either astronomical signs or straight up runes to the tattoos to add a layer of magic. It would be some kind of invocaton or symbol alluding to what that tattoo is for.
Here are some other concepts I'm playing with for Theo's scar-to-tattoo transformation ideas...
Bold lines, geometric shapes, or the intermingling of the geometric and the natural....The other piece of this is that these tattoos sometimes have color.
For example, Magnus Nott had a red and black tattoo on his right forearm that might have looked something like this...
This came from his mastery of Runework of the Flesh (he was particularly talented, though, in spellwork and spellcrafting flesh-and-bone centered magic). Their magical tattoos wouldn't be the same, because Magnus's interpretation and mastery of the magic is far different from Theo's. Theo uses those kinds of runes to restrain, target, and incapacitate. Magnus used them to eliminate his enemies as swiftly and as deciseively as possible.
Believe it or not but Theo's bloodthirsty ruthlessness comes from his mother lmfao. Magnus wasn't a shrinking violet to violence by any means, but he didn't like to make things suffer. Theo and Ophelia are on Team Suffering.
I could say more but that will wander into BIG HUGE SPOILER territory so I won't go there. Just let it be known that I am going to tat, pierce, and dye the hair of these witches and wizards as much as I want (which is a lot). They're magic gdi, they should have significant Aura.
Thank you for asking!!! This was so long! I hope you enjoy the appearance of Theo's first tattoo when it comes!! Harry certainly will! ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
