Coptic

On YokoFolio, pick the style Coptic and then your city. The style is rare, and it's largely practiced in a community setting rather than in a shop. Look for someone who knows the use of the mark as well as its drawing — the placement, the size and the context are part of the sign. If you aren't Coptic, read up first: it's a mark of religious belonging worn by a community that has faced, and still faces, persecution.

It's the mark of Egypt's Christians, and one of the few tattoo practices documented for centuries in the Mediterranean. It isn't commissioned like a shop piece: it's put on near the churches and at pilgrimages, in a setting where the community is present. Its function is practical as much as spiritual — making the belonging visible and permanent, including, and above all, when it isn't welcome.

A cross with four equal arms, often set inside a circle or ending in three dots at each tip — the three dots pointing to the Trinity. It says belonging to the Coptic Orthodox Church and, historically, it served as visible proof at the entrance to churches and at pilgrimages. The detail of what it says is told differently from one family to another: ask people from the community rather than a page of symbols.

Because the sign is handed down as a family inheritance rather than taken as an individual decision: it's often put on very young, sometimes at a pilgrimage, in a ritual moment that commits the family as much as the child. That early timing has a simple historical reason — a mark put on early and permanently was hard to disown, which counted in periods when the belonging was costly. It's a sensitive subject, including inside the community: better to approach it with people from it than from secondhand articles.