Item: Staring Skull
This tattoo usually depicts a humanoid skull with staring eyes in its sockets, but any creature with two eyes and a skull is possible, such as a wolf, phoenix, or psychopomp. When your dying condition increases to a value that would kill you, this tattoo reduces your Dying value to 1 fewer than would kill you. If a death effect would kill you—provided the effect is from a creature of 8th level or lower or a spell of 4th rank or lower—this tattoo activates and keeps you alive instead. You can benefit from this ability only once per day. Each time the tattoo prevents you from dying, one of its eyes disappears, the image now featuring either an empty socket or an eyepatch or other covering. After both eyes vanish, the tattoo becomes non-magical and no longer protects you. If you receive a new staring skull tattoo, any other you have loses its staring eyes and becomes non-magical.
Trait Effects
Invested: A character can invest only 10 magical items that have the invested trait. None of the magical effects of the item apply if the character hasn’t invested it, nor can it be activated, though the character still gains any normal benefits from wearing the physical item (like a hat keeping rain off their head).
Magical: Something with the magical trait is imbued with magical energies not tied to a specific tradition of magic. Some items or effects are closely tied to a particular tradition of magic. In these cases, the item has the arcane, divine, occult, or primal trait instead of the magical trait. Any of these traits indicate that the item is magical.
Tattoo: A magical tattoo has the tattoo trait. It's permanently a part of the subject's body, and reduces the number of items that creature can invest per day by 1. Each tattoo has the invested trait to indicate this limitation—a magical tattoo is like an invested item that the tattooed creature has no choice but to invest. If the tattoo loses its magic or is destroyed, it no longer reduces your investiture. Just like a physical magic item, a magical tattoo can be counteracted by spells like _dispel magic_ or _disjunction_. If destroyed, the tattoo fades from the skin. If a creature gets a new magical tattoo when their limit on invested items has already been reduced to zero, the new tattoo's magic fails to take hold, and it becomes a non-magical tattoo instead. However, a tattooist can alter an existing tattoo when they Craft a tattoo, modifying the old one into a different magical tattoo and removing the old effect. Magical tattoos can usually be upgraded into their greater versions by having a tattooist add to or modify the existing tattoo.
Related Items
| Name | Level | Rarity |
|---|---|---|
| Aurochs' Might Tattoo (Lesser) | 8 | Uncommon |
| Tooth and Claw Tattoo (Greater) | 8 | Common |
| Bewitching Bloom (Bellflower) | 7 | Common |
| Bewitching Bloom (Lotus) | 9 | Common |
| Bound Guardian | 9 | Uncommon |
| Crown of Insight | 7 | Uncommon |
| Enveloping Light (Greater) | 9 | Uncommon |
| Eye Slash (Major) | 9 | Common |
| Fauna Guardian | 9 | Uncommon |
| Flowing Water (Moderate) | 7 | Uncommon |
| Nemesis Name | 9 | Common |
| Reflexive Tattoo | 7 | Uncommon |
| Soaring Wings | 9 | Common |
| Tradecraft Tattoo | 9 | Common |
| Venomed Tongue | 7 | Uncommon |
| Warding Tattoo (Fiend) | 7 | Uncommon |
| Wyrm on the Wing | 9 | Common |
| Wyrm's Wingspan | 9 | Common |
| Arctic Vigor | 10 | Uncommon |
| Bewitching Bloom (Magnolia) | 6 | Common |