Let me try to explain.

I have read that, before the tattoos, people went from one charlatan to the next seeking some knowledge of the future. They consulted everything from crystal balls to playing cards. Mostly, they were told exactly what they wanted to hear.

The tattoos swept that away almost overnight. They were confusing, yes, but they could be read. A few people had the knack for it, and everyone else was revealed to be a fraud.

You, like me, are unmarked, so you will not understand how the tattoos look. In my life I have only seen two fully, and got a few glimpses of others, but I will try to convey how they are.

The first thing about them is that they shift. Not in overall content; the future is not subject to change. But in which elements are prominent, which fragments of text are readable, they vary almost hourly.

The second thing about them is that they are difficult to understand, confusing jumbles of images and letters in many languages that could be interpreted any one of of a hundred ways. That is why those with the gift to see deeply into them are valued highly.

In death, they resolve themselves neatly and unambiguously, so that a child could understand them. But while their host is alive, the tattoos will shift and change, perhaps in an effort at concealment.

I tell you all of those details so you understand why I found it difficult to date.

With our deaths visible and vulnerable on our skins, and a few around with the art of reading them, concealing your tattoo from others was a vital custom. There were a few stories of men tricked into nakedness in front of people with the sight, who then carefully arranged the correct circumstances of their deaths perhaps years before they might have come to pass. But is the future not fixed and unchanging? Perhaps, and perhaps not.

Disrobing in front of a lover was rare, not to say dangerous. People undressed each other only as a gesture of absolute trust, learning the structure of each other's deaths at the same time.

And then there was me. The people around town eyed me with a certain level of distrust, my white robe marking me out as one of the unmarked. There was a fashion in those days to wear clothes that hinted, daringly, at the details of the tattoo concealed beneath on the skin; I suppose in a manner of speaking I was part of that fashion.

But no-one talked to me for longer than they could help, and anything approaching emotional intimacy was impossible.