#niben

tattoos are not particularly common in Cyrodiil, and they don’t exactly add to one’s respectability in certain fields, but they’re far from unheard of, and they grow more common further south into the Nibenay Valley. especially around Blackwood and closer to the borders of Elsweyr, they grow more frequent; while still hardly prevalent in the general population, they’re pretty accepted, and often used as shorthand symbols and identifiers for various groups or representative of an individual’s beliefs and values.

(relevant headcanon I may write up more formally at a later date: the Nibenay Valley has historically had a lot of religious variation, and though this has not officially been the case since the formalisation of the pantheon of Divines, worship of other, older myths and deities remains, most particularly in groups on the fringe of society... like, for example, bands of outlaws.)

Pax has had the hand and neck tattoos since they were a child of about ten or eleven. The lines on their index and middle finger go all the way around, effectively like rings; they denote skill in archery and, according to some superstitions, fortify it. The eye on the back of the neck originated a long time ago, as an emblem of a Nibenay goddess of stealth and cunning (who modern scholars associate with, and often believe is a variation of, Nocturnal). Worship of this deity has all but vanished, but her symbolism is still used by those involved in the Niben’s criminal underbelly as a mark of recognition.