Nyx in the House of Night

Oliver
    WHAT EXACTLY possessed primitive humans to inflict marks on their skin is hard to fathom. Perhaps one of the tribesmen had inadvertently gotten some dirt or ashes in a wound and once it healed, it remained discolored. While sitting around the fire swapping tales, his buddies might have made note of this new thing. With a little experimentation, they realized that if they opened a fresh wound, charred a stick, and buried the black residue inside the slice, the result was a tattoo. Proof that humans are endlessly inventive when they’re bored.
    Thousands of years later we have a story about a high school girl who is having a rough day: while Zoey Montgomery is trying to cough her lungs out, her best friend is prattling on about Z’s drunken “almost” boyfriend and a football game. That all becomes irrelevant when Zoey spies the undead guy standing next to her locker. Don’t know about you, but I didn’t have dead guys waiting for me in high school. (Not many of the live ones, either.) There’s no way Zoey can ignore the newcomer’s vivid Mark, the sapphire blue crescent moon tattoo on his forehead, and “the entwining knotwork that framed his equally blue eyes” ( Marked ).
    This dude is a Vampyre Tracker, and he’s not there to compare notes on Zoey’s upcoming geometry test. Instead, he comes equipped with some seriously solemn words for the occasion: “Night has chosen thee; thy death will be thy birth. Night calls to thee; hearken to Her sweet voice. Your destiny awaits you at the House of Night.” After a point of his finger and a totally blinding headache, Zoey no longer needs to fret about her exam. She’s got bigger worries, as that crescent Mark on her forehead announces to the world she is a fledgling vampyre and belongs in a House of Night.
    All because of a tattoo.
    A SHORT HISTORY OF BODY ART
    Different types of body art (tattoos, scarification, piercing, henna, and makeup) play different roles depending on the culture, tribe, and individual. From the simple application of makeup to the painful and permanent scarring created by scarification, the results alter not only the skin but society’s perception of the skin’s owner. Where we in the Western world think nothing of females donning makeup, the act of inserting objects into the skin or having facial tattoos is an entirely different matter. To other cultures, such physical adornments are as common as layering on some foundation and a bit of mascara. Like beauty, tattoos are in the eye of the beholder.
    Made by pricking or grooving the skin and adding colored pigment, tattooing has always involved some element of risk even with modern techniques and equipment. The word itself comes from the Tahitian word tatau, which means “to mark.” The earliest evidence of skin art was found on the Iceman, mummified remains discovered along the Italian-Austrian border in 1991. Ötzi, as he is called, carbon dated at about 5,200 years old.
    During their mid-eighteenth century voyages to Tahiti, Captain James Cook’s sailors embraced this colorful embellishment, bringing skin art home to European and American societies, where it at first remained primarily confined to the lower classes. Tattoos were considered newsworthy, so explorers would bring home indigenous tribesmen, be they Native Americans, Africans, or Polynesians, to be put on display so that citizens could gawk at the “savages’” tattoos.
    It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that European nobility realized they were missing out and began to acquire tattoos themselves. Such notables as King Frederik of Denmark and Czar Nicholas possessed epidermal art. King Edward VII sported a Jerusalem cross in honor of his journey to the Holy Land, and both of his sons (the Duke of Clarence and the future King George V) were tattooed by a Japanese artist. Once royalty took the plunge, it was perfectly acceptable for the upper class to consider adding a mark or two to their own flesh.
    In 1891, Samuel Riley created the first tattoo machine by adding an ink chamber and a needle to Thomas Edison’s original design for the electric pen, which was used to create stencils to duplicate drawings and handwritten documents. In 1929, Percy Waters modified the pen further, adding an on/off switch, a spark shield, and a needle that could cut plastic stencils. Today’s devices can be adjusted for different depths, pressure, and needle speeds, allowing the artist finer control over the final