Mouan de Forèsadi

My battalion stopped at the edge of the blanket of ash that covered the ground and stood in silence. No one wanted to tread upon the white in front of them, afraid of it as if it was some sort of poison.
Then we saw them. Men, women, and children all truding their way out of the skeletal tree trunks, covered in the same ash that surrounded them.

-An account from the Ashgrave War

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The "People of the Ashwood" are a people without a home.
Once, they lived in a collection of tribes within the Bwa Sann (the name that the Ashwood held before its destruction), largely apart from the outside world and it's other cultures. Consequently, little is known about the form that their society took before the sundering of the Ashwood. Much of their culture and history was lost, and many of the social rituals that have survived relied on elements of the woods that no longer exist.
Only a fraction of their original population survived the initial blast, and the rest were marked indelibly by the cloud of ash that bloomed over the forest that fateful day, which painted their bodies with the gray remains of their ancestral home. A mark they bear until this day, for unknown reasons.

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While the social groups of the Forèsadi have struggled to remain interconnected, scattered to the wind by the necessity to find a home and adapt to modern society as they were, they have remained together, most often in small enclaves scattered around the globe.

The swirling "ash tattoos" that mark the skin of the Forèsadi are unique to each individual, and something that all children born to even one Forèsadi parent will have. Even between twins, these tattoos differ.
These signs on the skin don't weaken with intermarriage, either, no matter how far away one gets from the heritage that provided the markings, they remain as strong and prominent as they did on your progenetor ancestor.