᚛ᚑᚌᚐᚋ᚜

Ogham is an interesting writing system with a lot of unusual features. It was used to write Primitive Irish inscriptions on stone monuments in early Medieval Ireland and parts of Britain, the letters consisting of tally-mark like lines carved along the edge of a stone column. It’s a writing system that originally existed on a three dimensional medium rather than a flat page or tablet. Being written on the edges of standing stones means it is also a vertical writing system and unusually it is one that is read bottom-to-top¹ and it’s the only writing system encoded in Unicode with its own unique space character where the space is not blank but a straight line.

I was originally writing more infodumping here but I thought it was coming out very dry and if I have piqued your interest then you are just as capable of reading the Wikipedia article on Ogham as me.

But ogham is really cool and pretty common tattoo fodder. Years ago I was considering getting my name tattooed in Ogham but at the time I also felt very perfectionist about getting something permanently drawn on my body and never went through with it. It’s just as well as that was pre-transition and I would have then had my deadname stuck on me. Having been transitioning for a few years the idea of permanent changes to my body no longer felt like such a big deal² and I have gotten a couple of tattoos now without worrying to much about it but I never got that Ogham one.

I was thinking about this recently and have been experimenting with an Ogham design that is deliberately my dead name with my chosen name written over it. It happens to work out pretty well because the rendition of my name into Ogham has more strokes than my deadname and the new strokes can be pretty easily added in to the gaps provided that some space is left between each line (and particularly with some deliberate stylistic liberties in how I am transliterating the names). So maybe I will still get my deadname tattooed in this way?

Also sometimes people try to make modern calligraphic or cursive interpretations of Ogham and I think that’s really cute. Check out Úrogham and Ogham Cruinn.