The only time I tried to write this was Les Mis canon, where it's a major canon element that a) literacy is still very limited (in France, less than 200 years ago - writing existed 10000 ago, but universal literacy has been a lot slower), and b) the spelling of names, even among the literate class, is not settled, and "everybody having a surname" is still very new. So I couldn't just gloss over how it made no sense without contradicting major themes of canon.
So it was really tough, in that setting, to come up with any way where "Everybody automatically has a name written on their wrist" makes any sense. Because on the one hand, 75% of the population wouldn't be able to read it. And on the other hand, within living memory 75% of wrists would have just said "Jean" or "Jeanne" and nothing else anyway.
I needed it to say words for my story conceit to work, so I went with Miracles, and specifically that it was something that boys of a certain class had done as a religious ceremony in the Catholic Church around the time of confirmation, which let me play with the class issues, and also made sense to me since the Church was so closely associated with literacy in the West for so long. (Presumably in secular periods you could also have it done via secular magic, and presumably other culture groups would have other variants, and presumably somebody who didn't want to believe in magic could say it was all a fraud and the officiant just tattooed/branded whatever they felt like or were paid to write.)
I have seen variants where it's automatic and natural and symbolic in nature, though - pictographs or actual pictures or abstract color swirls. Those can work really well (and be really cool, depending on how evocative you go with the images.) Sometimes you have to decode the pictures, sometimes they match. (It would actually be really cool to write a story where most people have pictures, but you have words, because you and your wristmate are both extremely verbal-oriented people. Or where increasing global literacy - more and more people thinking in text - means wristmarks are in the middle of a shift from symbolic to textual. And maybe this is happening at different rates in different cultures;
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So it was really tough, in that setting, to come up with any way where "Everybody automatically has a name written on their wrist" makes any sense. Because on the one hand, 75% of the population wouldn't be able to read it. And on the other hand, within living memory 75% of wrists would have just said "Jean" or "Jeanne" and nothing else anyway.
I needed it to say words for my story conceit to work, so I went with Miracles, and specifically that it was something that boys of a certain class had done as a religious ceremony in the Catholic Church around the time of confirmation, which let me play with the class issues, and also made sense to me since the Church was so closely associated with literacy in the West for so long. (Presumably in secular periods you could also have it done via secular magic, and presumably other culture groups would have other variants, and presumably somebody who didn't want to believe in magic could say it was all a fraud and the officiant just tattooed/branded whatever they felt like or were paid to write.)
I have seen variants where it's automatic and natural and symbolic in nature, though - pictographs or actual pictures or abstract color swirls. Those can work really well (and be really cool, depending on how evocative you go with the images.) Sometimes you have to decode the pictures, sometimes they match. (It would actually be really cool to write a story where most people have pictures, but you have words, because you and your wristmate are both extremely verbal-oriented people. Or where increasing global literacy - more and more people thinking in text - means wristmarks are in the middle of a shift from symbolic to textual. And maybe this is happening at different rates in different cultures;