Your Nickname: Nuri
If you have written other characters here: Yes
Is this a Primary or Secondary Character?: Primary



Character Birthday & Age: 1st August, 1973. 37 years old.
City & Country of Birth: Hamburg, Germany.
Blood Purity: Halfblood
Alma Mater: Durmstrang

Cover Job (If any): Tattoo Artist
Type of Criminal: Practitioner of the Dark Arts
Allegiances / Loyalties / Political Faction: None
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What crimes have been committed:

Dietrich has tortured (use of the Cruciatus curse) a wizard in the United Kingdom over the course of a short visit in 2001. He was not suspected or convicted of this crime. He is guilty of having healed or hidden various criminals.

What crimes may be committed in future:

Continues to aid and harbour criminals. Will likely continue to practice dark magic to experiment with tatooistry and to protect his establishment.

Physical:

Dietrich stands tall at 6’6’’, with a broad and brawny physique. His eyes are a very clear blue and his hair is consistently blonde —underneath the trimmed beard, he looks fairly handsome but not remarkable. In spite of his height and build, Dietrich is a gentle wizard. He moves leisurely and with the appropriate restraint of a person who possesses great physical strength.

A single, fluid tattoo of a Wolf spider crawls along the length of Dietrich’s back and right shoulder. He also possesses a Hidden Mark (note: more in occupation) on his right forearm. When revealed, it appears to be another, much smaller wolf spider that slowly creeps to-and-fro his wrist. Unlike legal Hidden Marks, Dietrich’s is revealed by both an incantation and the smearing of his own blood against the bare skin.

Unconcerned by changing fashion trends, Dietrich dresses very casually. He is usually seen dressed in flannel or t-shirts. In the winter he wears a particularly bedraggled looking jacket that is dark brown in colour. In some ways, his style of dressing is an unconscious violation of the time he spent in Germany or Durmstrang, where formal attire was a more common requirement.

Personality:

Dietrich is very much “the big brother”. Having spent most of his childhood and adolescence taking care of his younger sisters, he now comes across as unperturbed and fatherly when speaking to anyone younger than him—or even to his assistants at the parlour. Incidents in his past have led him to reevaluate is pride; he knows how to walk away from a fight and, if capable, how to intervene to stop one. When associating with professional equals, friends or his regulars, Dietrich can be very charming… at least in his own relaxed manner. He is both professional and nonchalant when at work—people come to be inked at his parlour because he knows what to say to the right customers.

It should be known that Dietrich has not always been a patient man. In his youth, he was known to be moody and temperamental—the only things that kept him in check at school was his drive to succeed and the threat of falling down the social strata. He has only improved in temper over the last four to five years, after an incident involving the illegal torture of a wizard had caused him to understand the value of restraint. He is now less volatile and emotional; his blood pressure has significantly improved.

In spite of his unfussy approach to life, Dietrich is very much the artist. He frequently sketches or draws and the flat above The Inkwell is covered wall-to-wall with many designs. In a lot of ways, he is a romantic. Film, history, art and music are among the many ways he chooses to enjoy this aspect of his personality because it rarely shows itself in anything other than his art or love life. Dietrich’s other hobbies include jogging, boxing and (when he’s had enough to drink) singing Opera.

Although Dietrich is not a bitter person, he does hold some harsh feeling against his family- particularly his deceased mother and eldest sister. He dotes only on his niece (now in her ninth year). Dietrich knows very little about the father who had abandoned his family but he doesn’t hold anything against the man—after all, who could blame the guy for running away from his mother?

Dietrich does not have any directly negative notions in regards to muggles or mudbloods.  He does value their lives as less than purebloods or halfbloods but this is more of an unconscious presumption that rarely rears its head in conversation. After years of living among (as well as learning from) muggles in the US, he could hardly say that they were a terrible influence on the wizarding world. Dietrich does not have any political affiliations and wishes not to, as long as he can go about doing whatever he wishes without being caught. He enjoys mixing with the crowd in Diagon Alley and chooses to run alongside criminals because they provide him with otherwise illegal supplies required for the pursuit of his talents. They are also open-minded to his practice of the Dark Arts.


History:

Dietrich Jan Eisenburg was born in 1973 at the residence of one Konrad Eisenburg in Hamburg, Germany - though he would come to be raised in Frankfurt. He was the first and only son of Farah (née Kane) Eisenburg, an American halfblood who came to Europe and married her pureblood fiancé after having lived together in Berlin for two years. They were very young—both were twenty when Dietrich were born and neither of them particularly wise. But they held together for five years, which was long enough to have another three children: all daughters.

One cold morning in the spring, Konrad Eisenberg packed his bags and left his home. They never heard from him again. Dietrich’s mother became increasingly manic after her husband’s departure—she would stress on the family’s dwindling finances, beat her children on occasion and drink heavily in the evenings. She never worked but was still married to Konrad (on paper) and sustained her children by using up what her husband had left her as well as selling off family heirlooms/property. As such, these resources were still limited and would someday be unable to continue supporting them. And so Farah Eisenburg began to pin her hopes on her one son.


CHILDHOOD

It wasn’t a necessarily unpleasant childhood. The Eisenburg children had good memories of a sometimes-sober mother, sumptuous picnics and little adventures in the large home their father had left them. They were pleasant, obedient children. As Dietrich approached schooling age, his mother began to remind him that he would someday be the head of their immediate family. She told him, constantly, that they were going to have to rely on him to become a strong, industrious wizard so that she and her daughters would be able to live lives appropriate to their home. At the time it seemed of little importance—nagging. Things changed after Dietrich was sent to Durmstrang.


DURMSTRANG

Having never been in a very competitive environment, his commencing years at the school were very challenging for Dietrich. He found himself in the lowest strata of students, among the Dregs, struggling with extra lessons and initially failing to impress. Dietrich’s first year left him weak and sickly. He returned home only to be berated by his mother and pressured to work harder. Fortunately, an elder from the Zufrieden took Dietrich under his wing in the following year and it was this friendship, a kind of tough love, that helped him back onto his feet.

Dietrich was elevated to the middle strata of students by his third year. He began to develop a drive to succeed once he was old enough to comprehend the significance of his mother’s words—it was not her nagging that pushed him to work but the fact that he was finally starting to realize what kind of person she was. He knew that Farah Eisenburg was too proud to work and that she cared more about what other wizards thought than she did for her own kin. In the years that followed, Dietrich matured well. He grew taller and healthier. He ate ravenously, exercised strenuously and established a sense of self. At timse would get into duels over petty matters but often he was the victor and was rewarded by classmates for displays of strength. He opted to study both spellwork and tangibles. In this time, Dietrich became aware of his natural talents- he sketched, painted and played musical instruments with flair. It was laughable to compare him to the brittle little boy who had come to Durmstrang four years ago. As his academic performance improved, so did his popularity—it seemed that little Dietrich had become quite the charmer. Not the most good looking but certainly confident and charismatic.

In the last two years at Durmstrang, he was promoted to the Oberteils. Many were surprised at the elevation, most of all Dietrich himself, but the news was not unwelcomed. Years later he would be told that his mother had been having an affair with the father of an influential student within the Obertails. Dietrich began dating a girl from among the Zufrieden while at school. Their relationship didn’t last once she started to express jealousy of the girls in his new social strata. Upon graduation, Dietrich was offered an apprenticeship by a famous Apothecary in Berlin—he seized upon the chance to earn his own income and escape his mother.


APPRENTICESHIP

The Eisenburg sisters had not excelled quite as well as their elder brother at Durmstrang. They entered and remained in the middle strata, achieving average results and hardly making an impression with the elite students. Dietrich often urged them to work harder, to see the kind of person their mother was and to become independent of such a patriarchal structure. But they did not heed his warnings by continuing to side with Farah Eisenberg. 

As an apprentice, he earned little but learned a great deal in his training to be an Alchemist. It was a stressful two years—when he wasn’t at the Apothecary, he was working odd jobs to send money home to the family (they were beginning to run low on property to sell). In spite of how much he disliked their attitudes, Dietrich was bound to them by his sense of familial loyalty. He did not work trivial jobs but ones that were generally…unethical. Disposing of corpses, brewing poisons and setting up dangerous wards. His education had prepared him well for these errands. The people were not pleasant but they paid well. And then, as his first two years at the Apothecary drew to an end, Dietrich’s sister chose to marry—and she chose to marry well.

It came as a surprise to everyone when Abelone Eisenberg announced her engagement to a very wealthy halfblood wizard—she would be known as Madam Zimmer after the marriage. Their relationship was a bit of a relief to the family. Dietrich’s mother was overjoyed while his other sisters were happy that they did not have to rely so much on their elder brother anymore (having decided long ago that he was a bit of a wet blanket). Dietrich himself felt a great weight lift from his shoulders. Conversely, he also felt – for the first time in his life – superfluous to his family. They no longer needed him and he resented them for that. What affection they had ever shown appeared to be false, a pretense.
He had worked and sacrificed and dealt with ingratitude, but now they could do without him or his job. The apothecary in Berlin was a huge question mark because although it was interesting work, Dietrich did not know if it was what he truly wanted. In other words, the whole situation left the wizard feeling rather confused.

At Abelone’s wedding, a strange thing happened: Dietrich’s grandmother from California came to attend. None of the Eisenbergs had ever met the woman: she was an old but hardy American witch whose hair was as white as her blood was pure. And much like Dietrich, she knew precisely what her daughter was like. Once the wedding was over, Grandmother Kane offered her grandson an ultimatum: to stay in Germany or to come with her to America. She warned him that her life across the pond was nomadic and simple. He would have to live among muggles at times and his English would have to be worked on. Money might be scarce.

Bewildered by this offer, resentful of his mother and full of his own youth, Dietrich could only respond in the positive.


THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Dietrich began his life in America at a tiny, off-the-map town in the state of California. It was called El Agujero and half of its residents were second-generation muggle Mexicans from across the border. It was a small place with people who ran very practical and artistic trades. Dietrich and his grandmother stayed here for three years. He took up various jobs to bring in a steady income; most of them involved acquiring new skills, which he picked up very quickly—pottery, calligraphy, glass-blowing and cobbling. At one point, he found himself working as the town’s Undertaker for a few months after their last one had passed away in a fire. Grandmother Kane worked as a kind of “witch” by making what the muggles considered to be good luck charms or talismans.

Then, they travelled east and another three years went by in New Orleans. He managed to find a steady job at a tattoo and piercing parlour in the town center. By then, he had become quite good at speaking English and was starting to lose his accent. The parlour he worked for did jobs for both wizards and muggles. Dietrich did not get along very well with his colleagues… he often fought with them when he was drunk and their arguments about the muggle condition could rage on into the late nights. Regardless of this, he would quiet down for days at a time to actually learn their trade.  Among his customers was a Healer from their local clinic—after some flirting, the two courted each other for a year and he then took up living with her when Grandmother Kane decided to move on to another town. He took the opportunity of this relationship to improve his healing skills.

Dietrich and his girlfriend decided to visit Las Vegas on holiday in the year 1998. They broke off their relationship in the one-week that they were there and she left for New Orleans, telling him not to return. In the drunken stupor following this break-up, Dietrich wandered into the rowdiest bar Las Vegas had to offer… and there, he met a British witch by the name of Marlene Cherryschue. She proceeded to turn his life upside down.



BETWEEN TWO COUNTRIES

It should be made clear that Dietrich and Marlene were never lovers. She picked him up at a down point in his life and, upon learning that he was training to become a tattoo artist, offered him the role of her protégé. Marlene was nearly thirty years his senior and their relationship was friendly but it was still one between an apprentice and his master. Dietrich would come to love Marlene very much—she is basically the mother figure he never truly had and because of that he would also grow to feel extremely protective of her. That same year, the two of them took off in Marlene’s caravan and set up a tiny little tattoo parlour in Manhattan, New York. It wasn’t a profitable place—but then again, it wasn’t really meant to be. The establishment existed to give them both a front for Dietrich to learn tattoistry and for Marlene to pick up what she could from him in terms of the Dark Arts. She would however leave him for months at a time to return home to the United Kingdom and visit her family in Cumbria.

The months and years passed by very quickly in this fashion. In 2001, a letter arrived for Dietrich informing him that his mother was terminally ill. The tattoo parlour in downtown Manhattan was shut and for the first time in nearly ten years, Dietrich found himself in Europe again. Marlene and his grandmother both accompanied the wizard to see Farah Eisenberg on her deathbed. It was a quiet and anticlimactic death… she drifted off in her sleep and in Dietrich’s opinion, that was better than the witch deserved. He said just as much at the funeral and very nearly got into a duel with his brother-in-law, though Grandma Kane was quick to prevent further escalation. Even with mother Eisenberg’s death, there was still bitter feeling between the children. After the reading of the Will (in which there was little to bequeath), Dietrich travelled immediately from Hamburg to Britain. Here, he met Marlene’s family in the countryside and stayed a month in London to see the sights. 

In this one month, Marlene Cherryschue told her apprentice that she had finally decided to stay in the UK. There was family here and now that she was growing old, she wanted to be around what was most familiar. She had little more to teach him and wished to start her own shop. The news was not unexpected although the timing did catch Dietrich off guard. He was not happy about parting with his teacher. The night before he was to return to New York on his own, Dietrich took Marlene out for drinks. They had agreed that their partnership would conclude in the way it had begun—utterly drunk. 

Their outing began in laughter, though it ended on a far more unpleasant note. Over the course of the evening, Marlene had been approached and teased by a rather rowdy drunk wizard. It was harmless taunting at first but as they were leaving the bar, harsher words were exchanged between Dietrich and Marlene’s eager bully. A fight broke out in the alleyway; it was a duel between two unhealthily inebriated wizards and one of them was not accustomed to playing fair—or at least not by the rules they played with in England. Dietrich had cast the Cruciatus Curse. When Marlene, sobered by the reality of the duel, entreated him to stop, he did. The wizard had been too injured to give chase when the two of them left the scene. Marlene had expressed great anger at Dietrich’s actions. She broke his wand, reprimanded him and ordered the wizard to leave Britain that very night before the sun-up. She would not have him suspected of the crime.

Dietrich left London in a hurry. He returned to the shop in Manhattan, where he began hiring more artists while continuing the trade. In the following years, Dietrich would often visit Marlene. They were extremely attached to each other and once she had ensured that none of the MLE were seeking Dietrich, the witch welcomed him into her establishment whenever he came. The visits were frequent—three to four times a year. With each time, it was easy to see how Dietrich had changed since he left his teacher. The torture of the wizard all those years ago had made him sensible to the consequences of his actions. He had learnt that being able to get away with a crime wasn’t good enough a reason to perpetrate one.

During Dietrich’s last visit to London in the summer of 2007, Marlene asked Dietrich to stay and take over her shop, ”The Inkwell.” The offer was a generous but anticipated one. The witch was growing old and wanted to spend more time in Cumbria with her loved ones. Knockturn Alley possessed little allure to such a woman. It took a year for Dietrich to travel to America, settle his business and return to London. At first, the two of them worked together at the parlour for several weeks. And then Marlene packed her trunks: “Try to keep the place together, won’t you?” She told him, the eve before her journey up north.

Dietrich has now been the sole owner and Head Artist of “The Inkwell” since September 2008. He has hired three other persons and is in the process of collecting a modest but considerably varied customer base. Although not necessarily an immoderate criminal, Dietrich will help any of those who pass through his shop—at a price.



Describe Your Job:

”The Inkwell” is a Tattoo & Piercing parlour that is located on the edge of the Knockturn Alley—as close to Diagon Alley as a place can be without actually being there. Dietrich Eisenberg owns the establishment. He is the Head Artist- he generally performs all the tattoo work as well as the more complicated body piercings.

Dietrich’s signature tattoo is the spider. Back in Manhattan, he was known as Die Spinne, a nickname that some of his acquaintances or regulars are now also familiar with. His specialty is a form of tattoo called the Hidden Mark. Dietrich uses a technique that allows the mark to be concealed or revealed using a set of incantations or actions (depending on the tattooist or customer, some of these actions may be illegal/dark magic). He is among the few artists who is presently pioneering and specializing in the development of such a technique. Suffice to say, Dietrich is very good at what he does because he is extremely interested in it.

Besides Dietrich, ”The Inkwell” is run by two assistants. The assistants perform minor tattoo jobs and the basic piercings. His ex-girlfriend, Lana Gaddam, was once the secretary but he now logs the books himself.

Dietrich offers more than just piercing and tattoo services. He offers (legal) healing services for infected piercings/tattoos, under the condition that the work had been done at his parlour. He also offers (illegal) healing services for various criminals in the area, no questions asked. In exchange for such services to criminals, Dietrich’s expects to be paid in the form of favors. This usually entails obtaining special (but prohibited) dyes, tools or artifacts for his arts.


Sum up your character in one paragraph:

Dietrich Eisenberg (known as Die Spinee to some) is the Head Artist and owner of the tattoo/piercing parlour: "The Inkwell" on Knockturn Alley. He is a professional and talented tatooist who used to study at Durmstrang. Dietrich has been working in America for the last eight years-- he has lived a relatively colourful life. He is a friendly and collected wizard who understands the value of tact.