Zelda followed as best she could, noting the differences in the patterns and the meanings as he explained them. It reminded her distantly of her History of Magic classes, if only loosely - their curriculum rarely covered other cultures in depth, and Alfred was not a piece of history, because he was very much here with her in the present. It was more that she was learning about a visual language she didn’t speak, like studying the Picts again, and trying to decipher the meaning of patterns.

It was the explorer - or, experimenter - that let her get a better handle on his tattoos; the meaning of that particular band was also just so Alfred that the corners of her mouth twitched up as he explained.

She ran her thumb down the band he’d indicated. “So the meaning is more than the sum of its parts,” Zelda said, “And can’t really be pulled at from just one of them, right? It’s - all of it.” She was a person who liked to poke at the parts of things and figured out how they worked - so, this was different, but not in a bad way.

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