What are the tattoos seen on Roy towards the end of the film?
They are not tattoos. As Ridley Scott explains, “That was a half-developed idea that we never really cracked. You see, I’ve always like what Jean Giraud, the French artist and illustrator, does. His characters almost seem to be built up from various plastic parts, with odd divisions in their flesh. I couldn’t do that to Rutger though; the daily makeup process would have been impossible. So we experimented with some tattooing that was supposed to suggest something like demarcations in an engine. The idea really was that they indicated an alignment to certain socket points. I’d thought that when Roy was in battle in outer space, he’d probably put on a war suit and attach plugs to that suit at those markings. But it kind of dropped away, the whole idea, and never really worked” (Future Noir, 188).
