The Barrier Tattoo is an extremely popular item from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything for D&D 5e. As with all the magical tattoos introduced in that book they are applied with a needle. The needle must be held to the skin for the entire attunement process. As with other magical items, attunement takes 1 hour.
Barrier tattoos come in small, medium and large sizes. The small and medium allow the user to add their Dexterity modifier to a base AC (12 and 15 respectively) as long as they are not wearing armor. The large tattoo just provides a flat 18 AC. All of these tattoos allow the user to use a shield as well.
Barrier Tattoo: Recommended Prices
| Item | Price (GP) |
|---|---|
| Barrier Tattoo, Small | 6000 |
| Barrier Tattoo, Medium | 12000 |
| Barrier Tattoo, Large | 24000 |
Using This Item
These tattoos are a nice way to get your character and AC buff while allow them to work around certain restrictions. Proficiency is not required to use any of these tattoos, making them available to all characters. The large tattoo grants the same AC as full plate armor. It could be used by a heavy armor user who didn’t want to have disadvantage on stealth checks. It would also be useful for druids, as they cannot wear metal armor.
From a story-telling standpoint, these items would be great for stealth missions, social interactions and heists. Any situation where the players would want to appear non-threatening would be a good setting. As these tattoos can only be removed by breaking attunement, they would also be useful if the PCs were to be captured. The baddies can take away everything else, but they can’t take away the tattoos.
The flips side of this is that the barrier tattoo’s effect can be suppressed by anti-magic fields. This is just the sort of thing PCs will want to avoid if they’re going to be getting into a fight with a beholder. Likewise, this is just the sort of thing a DM will want to remember to better endanger PCs.
You can find prices for almost all other official magical items here.
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