Nyx in the House of Night

their leader and perhaps recounted some of the battles that had earned him that position. The upper caste Maori of New Zealand were recognizable through an intricate tattooing procedure called moko . Using a small chisel, the tattoo artist carved a series of parallel grooves into the face and body and introduced pigment into them. Highly regarded Maori tattoo artists were paid handsomely in goods—something lower-class individuals couldn’t afford.
    Women also employed tattoos, often to indicate mating status. When Tahitian girls reached the age of sexual maturity, a black solid mark would be tattooed across their entire buttocks. Until they received the tattoo they were not allowed to engage in sex. To let a young Tahitian male know she was interested, the girl would raise her skirts and display the tattoos. (Christian missionaries, not surprisingly, were shocked by this display of blatant femininity.)
    When Zoey enters the House of Night with her Mark filled in, it is an indication of Nyx’s favor that everyone recognizes the instant they meet her. Her status as Nyx’s Chosen manifests in other ways, such as through her affinity for the elements, but her tattoo makes sure everyone knows who is watching her back.
    The color of the red fledglings’ Marks also communicates a kind of status. Though the crescent moon on their foreheads indicates their membership in the vampyre community, the color marks them as “other.” Blue vamps versus red vamps. The established order versus the outcasts. Or from a human perspective: the scary outcasts versus the really scary outcasts.
    In our own past, Ancient Rome marked their slaves and criminals so that they might be easily identified and to alert others to the slave’s place in the pecking order. If a slave tried to escape, or was caught stealing or lying, certain brands were seared into the forehead so that all might know of the transgression. Though it’s tempting to consider that an archaic application, during World War II the Nazis used forearm tattoos to identify their “subhuman” slaves in concentration camps.
Seeing Red
T he color of the red fledglings’ Marks deserves special consideration. The authors could easily have allowed Stevie Rae and the others to retain their original sapphire blue Marks and indicate their new Vampyre 2.0 status in other ways. Instead, they chose to change the color of the tattoo. Sapphire blue is calming, a color associated more with melancholy than a feral urge to kill. Red is a powerful color, traditionally used to symbolize blood, violence, and wrath (one of the Seven Deadly Sins), and the change in the red fledglings’ Marks sends a clear message that these vampyres are a potential danger to everyone, even their own kind.
    SOCIAL STATEMENTS
    The moment you place a mark on your body you acknowledge yourself as a member of one tribe and an outsider to others—you are making a social statement about who you are and where you belong.
    Members of street and prison gangs use certain colors of clothing or styles of graffiti when marking their territory to set themselves apart. Gang tattoos transmit similar visual signals to their members and to those who would oppose them. But it’s not just their rivals they’re sending a message to. According to GangInk.com, an online resource for gang tattoos, “gang members in particular take pride in branding themselves as outside of the boundaries of conventional society.”
Going Bold
N ow that tattooing has gone mainstream, those seeking to make a bolder social statement often turn to scarification. This process (branding, cutting, or slicing patterns into the upper levels of the skin to cause extensive scarring) is not for the faint of heart. In the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, for example, young males are sliced on their backs, chest, and buttocks with a sharpened piece of bamboo, an excruciatingly lengthy and painful process. The resulting pattern represents the teeth marks of a crocodile, who the tribesmen believed created humans—their way of paying homage to the divine.
Most often seen in the sub-Saharan African cultures because the high melanin content of the skin makes tattooing difficult, scarification has crossed over the oceans to Europe and America. Gays and lesbians in San Francisco in the 1980s were early adopters, and the art form spread across the country in the 1990s.
    No matter the reason you choose to have skin art (or in the case of vampyres, whether you choose