!link! - Melkor Tattoo

The tattoo still whispered, but now it said things like: “Add more salt. No, more . Good. Now serve it with a garnish of fear.” The cauldron began to obey. Any meat thrown in emerged fall-apart tender, infused with a subtle dread that made orcs homesick for the bad old days.

“Ink my visage upon your back,” the being had growled, his crown of iron thorns scraping the cavern ceiling. “And I shall grant your cauldron the power to boil any meat, even troll kidney, to tenderness in seconds.”

Grom tried the stew advice. It worked. The orcs of the garrison wept with joy. melkor tattoo

But the tattoo also grew ambitions. It started twitching, stretching, trying to peel itself free. One night, Grom woke to find a black, two-dimensional arm emerging from his shoulder, groping for a knife.

“Release me, fool,” whispered the inky mouth on Grom’s lower back. The tattoo still whispered, but now it said

The problem was, the Melkor standing before him was not Melkor. It was a minor spirit of deceit named Urluk, who had escaped the Void clinging to a discarded Silmaril shard. Urluk had a lovely baritone and excellent stage presence, but he had no idea how to grant cooking powers. So he improvised: he decided to give Grom a tattoo that would become Melkor—a living, breathing sliver of the Dark Lord’s essence, trapped under orc-skin.

Of all the orcs in Mordor, no one knew less about tattoos than Grom. He was a cook, not a skin-artist. But when the Great Lord Melkor—or at least, a very convincing impersonator claiming to be the Dark One returned from the Void—offered him a job, Grom didn’t argue. Now serve it with a garnish of fear

When she finished, Grom looked in a mirror. The tattoo now depicted a fat, cheerful kitchen-god—Melkor, the Dark Cook of Legend.