Can someone make a list for me of all the reasons why tattooing seals on your skin is a really, really bad idea?
I am currently aware of the following:
1: Living skin has chakra in it. Therefore, the seals are permanently infused? Also, quite possibly you will somehow disrupt the chakra currents occurring in the seal if you don't somehow align them to your own chakra's natural or deliberate movements.
2: Living skin is not a stable medium. While it is apparently the same on a day to day basis, in actuality it is continually undergoing cycles of decay and replenishment, just like all living cells. This distorts the seal, inevitably leading to sealing failure.
3: If you have a sealing failure, that sealing failure happens IN YOUR SKIN. There is literally no level of safety precautions where this will be a good day for you.
I'd also like to ask:
What do we know about what makes something a seal? Sealing languages are unique to individual sealmasters, so that implies there are multiple variants that produce the same effect. Have we had the opportunity to examine a dozen different variations on the standard explosive tag? If so, are there any clear commonalities? What does the basic explosive tag look like, anyway? Can you just infuse any inked design with chakra and have it experience a sealing failure?
1, as far as I understand, is not relevant, but 2 is a
big issue and 3 just makes it worse.
We're not too well-informed about the
real practicality of non-standard sealing mediums, because Kagome tends to shut down those topics pretty quickly with stuff like 'it's insane don't do it unless you want to die'. We
do know that Arikada managed to learn biosealing, largely by using other people as test subjects, and that (from what Kagome
has told us) skin is not a stable medium and so if you put seals on yourself they're likely to fail and kill you.
My guess is that biosealing is perfectly viable if handled carefully, but you'd want to use any bioseals the same day or so to reduce the chance they fail on you.
Still, if we're looking at alternate seal mediums, I would like to again advocate
printing press seals. They're incompatible with our current paradigm because the nuances of a brushstroke
are meaningful in a way a stamp can't replicate, but if we can reinvent even just explosive seals in stamp-style we could collaborate with the Nara to make enough explosive seals to change the face of warfare
again.