The stories told through body scarification cannot be untold; the designs and images inscribed on the body cannot be undone. Since the early 2000s, young people across the countryside of Greater Pibor in eastern South Sudan have been incorporating new images and symbols of power and modernity into practices of body scarification, ranging from wrist-watches, pens and water pumps to army ranks, mobile phones and Kalashnikov rifles. In this talk, Diana Felix Da Costa draws on over a decade of research in Greater Pibor to ask what this shifting iconography reveals in relation to the militarisation and fragmentation of the important social institution of the age-sets, but also what it represents for individual and collective youth identities and sub-identities, and to young people’s hopes and aspirations.