Orcish Tattoo Needles

Written by Lokrow

The Orcs of the Hold of Belkzen love turning their bodies into works of orcish art. As such, tattooing is a common practice everywhere. Clans usually have a couple tattoo artists who may themselves have a couple assistants or apprentices. They tend to do both needles tattoos, scarifications and body paint as well as piercings.
Orcish tattoo artists use hand crafted needles to embed pigments into the skin also by hand. They use pigments which they keep in powdered or dry form in leather sacks and mix with any available liquid in hollowed out hooves of large game, which they then dip the needle into to apply it to the skin.
An orcish artist will tend to own between 20-50 needles, dependent on the size of the clan. Some different shapes or sizes but mostly for sanitation. Orcs have observed that letting a needle sit out in the sun diminished the spread of certain diseases among orcs.

Manufacturing process

Orcish tattoo artists all craft their own needles. They'll pick a certain bone, clean it in boiling water or if lacking water by rubbing salts and sand particulates onto the bone until they feel satisfied with having removed remnants of meat or sinew from it.
They then can use multiple techniques to shape the raw bone into a needle for tattoos.

Splintering

When using a whole bone and especially if it's large, some orcs may choose to crack the bone with a blunt impact to get an acute point with sharp edges. They then remove excess bone material and shape the bone into the ideal fit with their blade and/or by grinding the bone onto a stone.
This method can take a couple tries to get the good cracked point and edges. As such, it tends to be mostly used by starting on bones much larger than is required as a lot of material can be lost trying to get a proper point which can hold and not chip.
I does however produce an overall higher quality needle quicker than alternate methods and the finished result causes less pain as it pierces through the tough skin of orcs, with the drawback that it wears much faster.
Particularly skilled orcs know exactly how to execute this technique and can start with a raw bone just slightly bigger than the finished needle.

Whittling

More time intensive, an orc can take a piece of bone and whittle it to shape until satisfied. This process tends to be favoured by less experienced tattoo artists or orcs who prefer having less unpredicatbility in the shape of the needle point. It produces cylindrical needle tips with just as sharp a point but which lack edges and cause more pain in the tattooing process, but the needles tend to be more reliable.

Sanding/Grinding

Especially useful when the raw material is a bone splinter of the correct size, sometimes all that is needed is to sand and grind it to fit in hand comfortably.

Item type

Miscellaneous

Related ethnicities

• Legacy Clans
• Seed Orcs

Rarity

Common
Significance
Cultural.

Raw materials & Components

• A bone or bone splinter as long or longer than the space between the tip of one's thumb and the tip of one's pinky

Or, alternatively though rarer:

• Hard woods

• Fangs or talons of large creatures

Tools

• Water

• A pot

• A source of heat

Or

• Salts

• Mineral dusts

And

• A blade capable of chopping or shaving bone

• A flat stone