Responses

important in the sense that there are other scenes revolving around it (like taekjoo removing the tattoo, zhenya finds out that taekjoo removed it, later in part two it leads to zhenya doing the second tattoo, which as you said, is important as well because that’s how zhenya realizes taekjoo isn’t dead and just important symbolically). none of these future scenes make as much sense if they skip the tattoo scene here
Aijinoki! to other novel readers, did they skip out the part where zhenya gives taekjoo a tattoo or is that later?