BUR #57141 is pending approval.
create alias tattoo -> body_markings
If you look at our tattoo vs body markings tags you will notice that there is zero difference in how they are used.
This is especially true for facial mark tags: compare heart_tattoo facial_tattoo with heart_facial_mark, or teardrop tattoo with teardrop facial mark. They are exactly the same.
This is terrible for us, because we have the same kind of posts on two completely different tags, something which is not even immediately obvious to the more casual user. You might be missing half the results you're searching for depending on which tag you pick.
So what to do? The naive option is to alias tattoo to body markings, and to leave subtags for proper traditional tattoos, such as the already existing tribal tattoo, full-body tattoo and tattoo sleeve. More could be created for other cases, which at the moment are impossible to find anyway.
My first thought was to check in arm_tattoo or shoulder tattoo to find more examples, but those are filled with Hatsune Miku and they also don't look different from body markings.
We can't even say that tattoos are typically black: we have red_tattoo at 5k posts, and Miku's there too.
So in short, since you can't really tell whether a body marking is magical or made with ink, I think it's pointless to try and distinguish the two umbrella tags, and we should just merge them into one tag for "permanent" drawings on the body.
We will probably have to alias the rest of our tattoo tags to something like x_body_marking, though I don't think it's strictly necessary: pubic tattoo for example can just stay like that since it's a pretty well known meme, while it's debatable whether glowing tattoo is really mostly tattoos. It'll be a case by case basis, and naming wouldn't be a vital issue as long as everything's under the same tag.
I say permanent, because it doesn't look like this tag has been used on tally: tally body_markings has very few results, and in fact - ironically, even - there are more results under tally tattoo -race_fetishism -pubic_tattoo, even accounting for false positives (which I tried to exclude with the negated tags).
Whether we want to keep face marks/tattoos separated from non-face marks/non-face tattoos, that's a different question. The situation's already a mess with heart tattoo vs heart facial mark, so that's an issue that will have to be tackled after/if this is handled. For this reason, I didn't include an alias from facial tattoo to facial mark, to avoid scope creep and keep the voting simple, since facial tattoo currently implies tattoo. I will open a new thread for that once this is done.
Updated by nonamethanks
