"These are so principle of balancey. Is the needing a focus one awful? How special is specially prepared?"

"The needing a focus one isn't awful, you don't need to magically prepare the focus so it's not hard to get a new one if you're deprived, if you know how. A lot of people with that one get foci tattooed on them so they'll be harder to disarm." 

"Oh cool, that sounds good, I wouldn't mind having a tattoo. And this one wouldn't affect my wizardry if my tattoo got melted off or something?"

"Right, it applies specifically to witch powers. I have a decent guage of which things are going to apply to wizardry and which aren't, because witchcraft isn't the only supernatural thing around, here, and some complications affect non-witch abilities and some don't."

"Oh, what else is there? - monsters, I guess. Any nice things?"

"Yeah! A lot of species have personal abilities of one kind or another that don't depend at all on being a witch."

"What are the specifications for my tattoo?"

"There's a lot of room for choice. Do you have a favored aesthetic, a cultural context...? Tarot and similar decks are heinously difficult to manage usefully on human skin, but there are a lot of things more cooperative than that."

"Abstract whitework? My granddad has some of that and it looks neat. Sort of not totally different from what you see people doing with henna, only, it's in white on dark instead of the other way round."

"I can work with that. Sleeve between wrist and elbow okay?"

"Seems like the right place."

"Wands are a traditional option, and the forearm is the right place to approximate one. There's one that dulls empathy, one that makes it harder to learn magic, one that makes you fixate on a particular topic, and one that gives you permanent imposter syndrome."

"Harder to learn just witchcraft, or...?"

"Just witchcraft, yeah."

"I have no preconceptions about how hard that should be, is it like I will be locally stupider or... what, how does that manifest?"

"Mostly in making you slower to accumulate points, going forward."

"Slower than what?"