Hi all 
as it gets closer to my first event im scrambling the last bits of kit together. My focus at the moment is adding in little details and bits to make my character feel a bit more unique and fleshed out.
I’d like to include some tattoos (but also leave room for any future ig character development 
). I cant seem to find that many photos to use as reference for design ideas. Would anyone mind sharing their tattoo designs, and how you came up with a design that fit your character?
It seems the most common are vines or thorns there are a few if you look onnthe Wiki on the look and feel and the people pages there is a fair few on there also looks like some virtue runes too on a few but wait until you are there and swears an oath let someone help you there, im gutted i aren’t able to make at least E1 & E2 as my first event and the tattoos are what im finding hardest but keep it small for development
Yeah i thought commitment to a virtue could be a good one initially- or because my character is a physick, and oath to heal/help others? Though depending what happens with vines potentially coming about later i suppose this could change things too. Id thought about a single thorn but i dont really know if this would be legible, going to have to try out some different ideas and see how they look
Would runes representing virtues be something that makes sense for navarri, or are there other ways to represent the virtues that are more fitting for the feel of navarr? Tbh i also wasnt sure if the way and the great dance are mutually exclusive belief systems, or if there’s some sort of overlap.
I suggest starting out with just the Binding of Thorns and maybe one other small tattoo, face-wise. My character began with his Binding, one linked to an oath completed and another that memorialised leaving his childhood steading. With a Brand mark now too, he doesn’t have much face left frankly - there’s another oath marked with branding (sfx gelatine for a raised effect) on the back of one hand already too but I’ve never taken a photo of that for some reason. I have taken the opportunity to “remaster” (i.e. shrink) some a bit following the memory fog.
This picture is from before that though.
(And from day 2 so there’s a little bit of smudging that I’d forgotten about.)
The jawline is his Binding of Thorns, so I wanted it fairly prominent but well away from the left cheekbone. The idea was for a complex entwined pattern, each element/strand trapping the others as well as trapped by them, trying to use knotwork without it looking at all Celtic per the brief. Some of the vine ends are meant to look like they’re starting to bud, to suggest the Ambition for new things/better times ahead on account of the oath. In the end it became massively simplified because I needed to do it for myself in the field since I arrive after the game has begun.
The one with the blue flower is the leaving-home ink I mentioned. Star-shaped flowers are mentioned in the brief so I invented the winter flowering frostspear plant and put it’s flower with thorned vines arther than work out what the rest of the plant looks like. At original size, the tattoo was placed to stop where my hairline was around age 18 as that’s when the character got it. The idea was to indicate how old the ink is, since there’s a fair bit more bare skin up there now! The vines were going to be more intricate and have a couple more flowers, but again practicality had to win out.
On the other side of the head is an imbalanced figure-8 in blue, with thorns added so that it fits stylistically even if the colour is less appropriate. The idea was that the tattoo and oath both were made hurriedly in extremis in the depths of a Hercynian winter when travel was impractical and the steading was out of red ink (that’s how bad the sitution was). The oath was to take on the care of a younger relative, so the design started as two hoops interlinked until a friend pointed out the Wintermark insignia and i revised things. To save on face space, the larger loop goes around the base of the ear, with the little loop headed low on the jawbone.
No picture because the only one I do have is blurry and with the colour it feels less Navarr so less worth sharing.
The hand brand is a representation of Liathaven, using the shape of the major trods shown on PD’s maps rather than the territory’s cartographic shape that are ringed by a woven ring that to be honest often comes out looking like a circle of footprints. The trod lines extend out of the ring so as to tie the piece together.
Any long-term commitment is a good reason for a tattoo, one of the virtues especially and doubly so if your character is Dedicated, in my view. While the Vine isn’t an archetype at this point, if a Navarr has sworn an oath of to heal others (however broad or narrow) then that’s worth ink too. A single thorn shape might need some embellishment to be obvious, but a drop of blood hanging from the tip might be obvious enough and distinct from the runes.
I don’t know of runes for the virtues but my personal opinion is that it’d be a missed opportunity to not have something more Navarr-themed. For example, Loyalty could be represented by a heart (“Know your heart and what commands it’s devotion above all else.”) held is a vaguely ladder-like arrangement of thorned vines (“The Virtuous build up their fellows…”). The image for Courage on the wiki features an axe, whereas a spear would be more iconically Navarr. Meanwhile the arrow and bow shown on the Ambition page are perfectly suited to Navarr themes but it could also be abstracted to a line of feathers weaving through thorny vines. But that’s me probably going impractically intricate again.
There is a lot of overlap between The Great Dance and The Way. I don’t play in the religion game so this isn’t gospel, but I think of The Great Dance as a philosophical approach to the teachings of The Way. The Great Dance says that each soul has a correct place to be and Navarr should find that place for them, The Way says that human souls reincarnate so between the two, in each life a person ought to be looking for the right place for them in that incarnation. I’m edging into stuff better made into game and discussed IC at this point so will leave it there.
@lu-mon the help of @Unslain has helped me tenfold he knows his stuff and is a good dude and incredibly helpful hope you have a good 1st visit you can show me and the Famalam around on our 1st visit 
On the Vines note- I know most of the folks who have taken the Oath and are on the combat side (including Gawain) use the hollow thick outlined red diamond to note the Oath
It’s something that’s present after it, but is distinctive enough that as a non-Navarri player, I can note it.