leaving out obvious things like religious garb/religious symbols in jewlery, engagement rings/wedding bands, various pride flag colours and meanings etc:
semicolon tattoos: indicates that someone is struggling with or has overcome severe mental health challenges such as suicidal depression. You see them fairly often if you look for them. i’ve heard that butterflies and a few other tattoos mean similar things, but you’ll run into false positives with any more generic tattoos.
claddagh rings: learned about this while jewelry shopping recently; it’s a ring that looks like a pair of hands holding a heart. it’s an irish thing, the finger you wear it on and whether or not it’s inverted indicates your relationship status.
iron rings: In Canada, engineers wear an iron ring on the little finger of their working hand, made from the remains of a bridge that collapsed catastrophically. a decent number of my engineer friends wear the ring.
lace code: basically entirely dead, but if someone is dressed like a punk and they’re wearing black boots with red laces, there’s enough of a chance that they’re a nazi that i’d avoid them. there’s like a whole extended universe of lace colours and their meanings but red is the most (in)famous one.
astrology jewlery: astrology obviously isn’t real but if someone is wearing jewlery with their astrological sign, that tells you that 1) they are into astrology (or homestuck if you’re lucky) and 2) they likely have some affinity with their designated star sign, which you can ask them about.
teardrop tattoo right under the eye: this person killed someone or was in prison at some point, or want to pretend that that’s true for them (e.g. if they’re a soundcloud rapper from the suburbs). also see other prison tattoos
puzzle piece tattoo or jewelry: this person likely has an autistic child or close family member, and is not super up to date on the most uh, progressive thoughts on the topic. autistic people themselves are more likely to dislike the puzzle piece symbolism for autism
In-line with lace code is flagging, which has also mostly fallen out of use recently, and is not really done by gay youth these days, but you’ll still sometimes see it with older folks. Notably, to my knowledge, it has somewhat less geographic variation in colors than the lace code stuff does (though there still is some).
leaving out obvious things like religious garb/religious symbols in jewlery, engagement rings/wedding bands, various pride flag colours and meanings etc:
semicolon tattoos: indicates that someone is struggling with or has overcome severe mental health challenges such as suicidal depression. You see them fairly often if you look for them. i’ve heard that butterflies and a few other tattoos mean similar things, but you’ll run into false positives with any more generic tattoos.
claddagh rings: learned about this while jewelry shopping recently; it’s a ring that looks like a pair of hands holding a heart. it’s an irish thing, the finger you wear it on and whether or not it’s inverted indicates your relationship status.
iron rings: In Canada, engineers wear an iron ring on the little finger of their working hand, made from the remains of a bridge that collapsed catastrophically. a decent number of my engineer friends wear the ring.
lace code: basically entirely dead, but if someone is dressed like a punk and they’re wearing black boots with red laces, there’s enough of a chance that they’re a nazi that i’d avoid them. there’s like a whole extended universe of lace colours and their meanings but red is the most (in)famous one.
astrology jewlery: astrology obviously isn’t real but if someone is wearing jewlery with their astrological sign, that tells you that 1) they are into astrology (or homestuck if you’re lucky) and 2) they likely have some affinity with their designated star sign, which you can ask them about.
teardrop tattoo right under the eye: this person killed someone or was in prison at some point, or want to pretend that that’s true for them (e.g. if they’re a soundcloud rapper from the suburbs). also see other prison tattoos
puzzle piece tattoo or jewelry: this person likely has an autistic child or close family member, and is not super up to date on the most uh, progressive thoughts on the topic. autistic people themselves are more likely to dislike the puzzle piece symbolism for autism
Oh, also it looks like you forgot to finish your sentence in the astrology section.
heh, thanks, I was going to make a joke about memorizing the top 10 astrology signs but then I didn’t think it was funny enough to actually complete
In-line with lace code is flagging, which has also mostly fallen out of use recently, and is not really done by gay youth these days, but you’ll still sometimes see it with older folks. Notably, to my knowledge, it has somewhat less geographic variation in colors than the lace code stuff does (though there still is some).