Your Nickname: Hannah
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Is this a Primary or Secondary Character?: Primary

Full Character Name: Odille Bettina Pontarlier- Hughes
Character Birthday & Age: February 17th, 1979; 29
City & Country of Birth: Margate, Kent
Blood Purity: Halfblood
Alma Mater: Hogwarts; Slytherin Alumni
Job/Position: Tattoo and Body Piercing artist

Wand: Almond, Unicorn tail, Inflexible 10 1/2 inches

Physical Description: At five foot and nine and a half inches, Odille is a tall and slim woman, though sadly lacking in the willowy, feminine grace one might expect from a woman of her proportions. Instead, Odille is a stiff shouldered masculine looking creature with sharp other worldly features, a flat chest and even flatter feet. It is safe to say that Odille is not overly abundant with womanly allure.

Not that she minds of course, sporting a hair cut that has not grown past her ears since puberty and hiding whatever lingering traces of anything suggesting ‘woman’ behind shapeless clothes seemingly designed with prepubescent street boys in mind. It is because of this that she easily passes for a much younger boy than a woman approaching her thirties.

 Her attention to her appearance is lackluster at best, and regular bathing is not something she deems necessary, her philosophy is to wear her clothes until they fall apart without the tedium of washing them. Despite this though, she runs a particularly clean tattoo operation and her own piercings and tattoos are themselves cleaned and maintained with the utmost loving reverence.

Odille is decorated, as is fitting with her line of work, with a glinting array of barbells, plugs and studs not limited to her nose, ears, tongue, sternum and naval. She has several tattoos along her arms and across her back, though she considers anything above the neck rather vulgar.

Her hair is very dark and shiny when caked in hair product or simply unwashed, while her skin is pale and prone to light smatterings of acne which just adds to her pretty teenage boy-esque look. Her eyes are unremarkable, heavy lidded and a ditchwater brown colour without much in the way of life sparkling through them while her best features (in Odille’s mind if no one else’s) are a pair of well formed, defined lips and a set of cheekbones that could cut glass.

She is a heavy chain smoker and occasional drug user who smells strongly of rolled tobacco and disinfectant, if it is possible to assign a person a taste then Odille looks as if she ought to taste like rusted metal.


Personality Description: Odille is quite simply a rebel who ran out of things to rebel against. In the place of what was once an angry teenager is now a woman living more comfortably than she would ever want to admit. After years of rebelling against her family, her gender and a society she is disdainful of in general it pains Odille to realize that she might be for once, happy and settled in her line of work.

As is common with people who have their buttons permanently set to self destruct, this fear of contentment gives Odille something of a reckless personality. She likes a gamble, she likes a party and she's quick to anger. If anyone asks Odille, she was born a hardcore tattoo artist, slipping out of her mother’s womb with a bottle of beer in one hand and a pack of cigarettes in the other.

There’s a lot of arrogance in Odille too, with her sarcastic, jagged edge- her favorite mode is definitely disdain, coupled with boredom and it’s very easy for Odille to burn through companions and pass times before moving onto something newer and shinier.  Though she likes to pretend otherwise, Odille is in essence the same as any spoiled rich girl though she claims to find her old lifestyle intolerable. In fact the list of people Odille despises grows longer every day, posers and hypocritically ‘snobs’ situated high on her list. She is demanding of her friends, stubborn in her convictions and chronically afraid of being bored or perceived as dull. That said, there is something defensive about her- as is to be expected from the product of two muggleborns with something of an inferiority and superiority complex- she’s ready to lash out at anyone she feels is poised to hurt her. Odille likes to be in control in that respect, she chooses how closes a person is allowed to get to her- and she certainly chooses to play a lot of her cards very close to her chest.

She is electric and clever on the outside of it all- a tribute to her house, with a talent for her craft and a lot of satisfaction in a job that involves inflicting pain on others.  If this hardcore Odille is an ‘act’ then you can say one thing for her; she’s certainly very committed to it.


History: The Pontarlier-Hughes family were an aging and decrepit relic of Muggle aristocracy, perfectly suited to the aged and decrepit estate they inhabited. Long before Odille was born, the family had been worth nothing more than their name, shunted out of the sprawling country manor because of debts and forced to move into the coach house on the surrounding lands. By the time Odille’s father was born nothing was left of the family legacy but some drunken sprouting about heritage and the red-faced, cauliflower eared remnants of aristocratic inbreeding. A blessed relief then that Odille’s father got his Hogwart’s letter, the only wizard in a very long, very bloated and very drunk line of aristocrats.

It was strange then that Linus Pontarlier-Hughes, filled with illusions of grandeur for a very long time by his hot-air filled father should come to Hogwarts and find himself on the bottom most social rung as a muggle born.  It was a resentment that carried him through his schooling and were it not for the opportunity to distance himself from the poverty of his family and a genuine love for potions.  Fortunately, of the same ilk was a similarly muggle born middle class woman  of swiss parents, Hannelli Shcneider, who could not reconcile her extreme vanity and self satisfaction with the hatred that some of her peers held towards muggleborns- it was her job to look down on people, definitely not the other way around.  They were married due to nothing more than shared dismay and Odille was the product of a union awash with vanity, delusions of grandeur and resentment.

Odille of course despised her parents as soon as she was old enough to have any grasp on the emotion, hated their resentment of purebloods and their constant worries about appearance and being better than anyone else while living out of that old coach house because it was their ‘heritage’- the place was thick with damp and the cellars crawled with rats, if that was her so called heritage then Odille was thoroughly prepared to be disinherited. She despised the coach house, despised her belching muggle grandfather who lived with them, despised the way he spoke to her, the way he looked at her and how he used to take his anger out on her. This of course was why she hated her parents more and more- because they never did anything about her grandfather.

Odille spent a lot of her young life running away, to neighboring towns always trying to figure out how she could get together enough money to run away to London before anyone made her go to Hogwarts.

Isolated in that Coach House with a grumpy old muggle grandfather for company, it was no surprise really that Odille wasn’t quite the social butterfly anyone had expected.  She didn’t have very many close friends- as though anyone was going to be good enough for anyway.

 Odille cut her hair short to stick two fingers up at her mother and developed her artistic talents in exercise books when she should have been taking notes in Potions. Odille wasn’t the best student as she spent far too much time looking down on people as opposed to doing her homework. As it was, Charms was the only subject she was inherently good at and therefore the only subject she really wasted much effort on.

The grand plan of course was sticking it to her parents who had developed from hate figures to an enemy that had to be defeated at all costs. So Odille acted out, got tattoos and stayed out all night with pretty, slutty girls during the long summers between school. Her parents became all adults, which became all figures of authority and her rebellious streak got wider and thicker and darker. Her interests were developed in the knowledge that she could use them to spite her parents, tattoos were ‘vulgar’, peircings were ‘unseemly’, short hair and dressing like a boy was ‘unbecoming for a girl’ and the greatest day of Odille’s life was the day her mother confessed as to what a disappointment Odille had become.

When her grandfather died, Odille refused to go to the funeral but she did make sure to steal away to his grave some years later, hoik up a huge spitball and spit it right on the old man’s headstone. Right on the part where it said ‘beloved grandfather’.

She moved to London very quickly after her graduation and started an apprenticeship at a tattoo parlor, building up her skill over the last ten years.


Describe your job duties and how you go about them: Odille runs her tattoo parlour out of her home. She combines the use of muggle and magical technology to achieve the best results- charms to sterilise needles when doing peircings, and charms to embed the ink into the skin with tattoo patterns.

She keeps the environment that she tattoos in as clean as possible to avoid infection, traces tattoo patterns onto transfers. Tattoos can take anything from half an hour for something small to over four hours- pericings are over in a matter of seconds.

She charges extortionate prices and one could probably get a better deal somewhere- but Odille is running a business of course and is aware that no one wants to run the risk of getting a cheap tattoo.

Elaborate on your expertise in your field: She's got natural artistic flair, a steady hand and a knack for charms. Along with this she apprenticed under another tattoo artist for ten years.

Writing Sample: The flat was small but sparsely decorated and sort of bland to look at, as though it’s inhabitant was in some kind of transitional period- either coming or going, it was hard to tell. The truth of the matter, of course, was that Odille had been in this transitional period for coming on ten years now and still couldn't tell anyone whether she was coming or going.

 In the centre of the living room was a chair, sterile and uncomfortable looking- like something out of a Sweeney Todd number, though without the trap door at the foot of it. Laid out nicely on a surgical tray that could be wheeled over to the chair were needles, new and packaged up nicely.

Odille leaned against the doorframe and surveyed her victim (well, the Sweeney Todd imagery was hard to get out of her mind), a small nod of her head towards the girl sat in the chair. She was something pretty, all delicate and nervous looking, her big blue eyes deep enough to swim in and clear enough to betray that she was trying to get away with something she shouldn’t be.

“You of age?”

“Yeah, of course I am,” said the girl in the chair, with a degree of uncertainty. Not that Odille really gave a crap either way, it was the school holidays and they could do what the hell they wanted as long as Odille was getting paid at the end of it. The needle in her hand was long and sharp, she saw the girl’s eyes go towards it and widen further- Odille wouldn’t have thought that was possible. All she did though, was grin at the girl in her chair- sadistic really.

“You’re not drunk or have been drinking in the last twenty four hours? You’re not on any kind of drugs?”

“N..no,” said the girl. “I mean, not in the last twenty four hours.”

“I gotta ask that,” said Odille with a shrug. “Don’t worry you don’t have to piss in a cup in front of me or anything.”

Odille pulled a stool next to the chair and sat down on it, legs apart like a man, though it suited her far more than sitting with her legs crossed like some high society lady.

“Tongue out,” ordered Odille.

The girl opened her round mouth and poked out her tongue, all quivering and pink- she made eye contact with Odille as if saying ‘is this okay for you?’ and there was something a bit teasing there. But then again the little princess was probably here to stick it to mummy and daddy, she’d seen Odille’s short hair and manly clothes and assumed a bit of flirting would earn her even more rebel points.

Princesses should learn not to mess with people about to poke needles into their mouths.

Odille examined the tongue, its unique patterns like a fingerprint, the individual taste buds for the girl’s own individual tastes. There was candy and cigarette smoke on her breath- sugary sweet with a hint of something rebellious, something deadly. Odille marked the spot and sterilized the needle with her wand. The girl wouldn’t feel a thing, but Odille didn’t say that- she wasn’t a bloody healer at St Mungo’s and she didn’t need to employ any kind of bedside manner.

The needle went in, carved a hot tunnel in soft flesh, the girl shut her eyes and Odille smiled. With dexterous fingers she whipped out the needle and inserted the tongue bar before the girl had time to exhale. With a casual movement of her soft hands- the only clue really that Odille was at all a feminine type creature- Odille flicked the tongue bar callously.

She took the girl’s face in her hands and surveyed the piercing, feeling the Princess’ shoulders relax in her grip.

“That things going to swell up like a bubotuber,” said Odille softly.

“It hardly hurt at all.”

Odille grinned and put a finger on her lips, “Talking isn’t going to be so easy for you either in the next twenty four hours.”

The Princess was probably feeling a bit bold from the rush of the adrenaline and imagining what her parents where going to say when they saw her tongue because she skimmed a light finger over Odille’s wrist bone. Odille jerked away quickly causing the girl’s eyes to widen but she was smiling again, dangerous and languid.

“You can’t eat solids for the next week, and you can’t go kissing on anyone either. For an extra charge you can buy a potion that will soothe the swelling." She was a Slytherin, there was always an 'extra charge' and always would be.

"Please."

"That's two galleons and seven sickles then," said Odille.

Really though, she would have put holes into people for free if she couldn't get paid for it. Leaning back on that little stool of hers Odille watched the Princess leave and waited for the next victim to step into her chair.

Sum up your character in one paragraph: The way she see’s it, it’s Odille’s job to scar a person for life. Other people can judge her all they like but she does her job well and she does it with conviction.