Recently I visited a medieval market in a nearby town with my family. After paying six Euros entrance fee and getting my hand stamped I entered the baroque town center. Market stalls were offering chain mails, knights armor, swords, clothing and many other “medieval”stuff. If I asked a salesmen for the price he would most likely answer me in a fake medieval accent – which basically meant re-arranging grammatically correct sentences to make them sound like nonsense and creating words that surely never existed “back in the old days”. Of course there was the obligatory tournament in the afternoon with a few Czech knights. Not only liquer and cigaretts are cheap in the Czech Republic!
People with medieval outfit had free entry. Saving six bucks of course lead to a lot of witches, wizards, elves and even some knights and knaves floating the market. But – there is a catch, didn’t witches and wizards end up being burned alive if ordinary people got aware of their profession? And aren’t elves an extinct species of insects whipped out by global warming and El Nino?
Of course not on a modern version medieval market – Gandalf, the blond girl with a tattoo on the forearm and on the lower back is not in danger to end up on a village barbecue. She and her elvish friends from Middle Earth are save these days. Over all I counted ten girls with a tattoo on their lower back and either an elvish outfit or a wizard stick like in Lord of the Rings. Thank god this wasn’t a high socity party, otherwhise there would have been a huge copycat fight with body parts beeing cut of! A bare midriff Ian McKellen in the LOTR movies would have been disturbing, but the 20something blond female version is actually very sexy.
Well, I had a good time at the (fantasy meets) medieval market, sipped my coke from a plastic cup, watched the tournament with knights wearing rubber made chain mails and wooden swoards and thought how much more fun this could be if only I where 15 years younger…
I have a tattoo on my lower back, my midlife crisis. I had no idea how many people had them on their lower back until I received mine, then I noticed everyone has them. Recently, I have been told it is a Bimbo Brand or a Tramp Stamp. hmmmmm I have had it for two years and never heard anything like that before. Well.. I enjoyed your story and it made me think of the two names I heard just a few days ago about those tattoos.