Intergalactic Summit

It is well known that tattoos are an important part of Minmatar culture, even for those ethnic Minmatar living in the Federation. Many Minmatar people struggle with cultural standards of dress, that affect their ability to display their tattoos, while at the same time Minmatar capsuleers have long struggled with the questions posed by their career, such as if a tattoo retains the same cultural meaning when it is applied to a clone during the cultivation process.

Confusing!

One Minmatar capsuleer, a mercenary in the Federal Defence Union, has had an idea, to continue to show off their tattoos, and preserve their meaning. She has had the skin of one of her dead bodies, killed in action against unaligned forces in the Placid combat zone, preserved and put on display in her quarters.

Stylish!

“We were on patrol, looking for the Caldari forces, when some non-Caldari hostiles appeared, we engaged, and I was shot down. We held the field, and I was later able to recover much of the equipment from my shipwreck. I also found my corpse floating in space, and looking at the starlight reflecting off my tattoos, I had a sudden thought. I had come straight back into action, and my skin did not have all the tattoos on it, fresh clone skin doesn’t really tattoo that well, so I was, culturally speaking, not really myself. My recently killed self however, had all the tattoos. So, I took my body to this taxidermist that I had seen on one of the stations in Villore, and had the skin removed and preserved. Now it’s a lovely rug that I have out in my station quarters. It’s really quite a conversation piece.”

Controversial!

Other pilots were surprised and appalled by this turn of events, some were quick to condemn this as barbarism, while others expressed the sentiment that ethnic Minmatar should be allowed to express themselves in culturally appropriate ways.

Amazing!

Time will tell if this becomes a more widespread fashion amongst Minmatar capsule pilots.

In a galaxy with trillions of Minmatar, of course one of them, especially a clone, would try this out.

A little more morbid than usual, but nothing completely unexpected.

I mean let's be real here, some capsuleers are known to maintain whole galleries and collections containing the frozen bodies of their slain enemies, like trophies. This latest trend - if it's wide-ranging enough to be considered that - will fit right in.

Credit where credit is due: Still more civilized than Blood Raiders.

To be fair, you have to be very, very pathetic to get lower than the Raiders. They are right down there with Serpents, Guristas and Angels, only slightly below Sansha and EoM.

This thing is disgusting and morbid, but so far, only an issue to the practitioners. Personally I don't know how anyone can stand doing something like this, hanging it up in your own home? You are supposed to live in that place, after all...

I mean let's be real here, if you worried about "losing the meaning" you could have had the markings copies onto, I don't know, some sturdy paper and displayed as art? Engrave them on the bulkheads of your walls? Have a holographic display installed that "paint" the holographic markings on a surface of your choice? Get a hold of a simple statue of yourself and apply the markings for display? Plenty of ways to handle it.

Compared to any of these methods using your own dead clone's skin as a medium simply seems very short-sighted and needlessly wasteful.

Oh well. Whatever clears the jungle, I guess.