Why would someone want to mark their wood carving tools? Well, the answer is quite simply to keep track of them. Just like in school when you wrote your name on the outside of your notebook, if you are taking your wood carving tools out of the shop, you need to have them marked.
The marking will make the tool unique to you, so if you are carving with a your wood carving club and you lay your Flexcut Detail Knife down, two other carvers next to you don’t innocently pick it up as their own. Also having a unique mark will help to identify your tools if they are stolen or misplaced in a public place.
I have my initials burned into my knives and palm tools. I have also seen others that will use symbols or colors to mark their tools. It’s not very often that you see a Murphy Bench Knife with an Ace of Hearts in the side in red. You could also use those little colored dots that are used for yard sale pricing and wrap one around the shaft of your palm tools.
The point here is that you don’t have to damage or deface your tools in the process of marking them. You just need some way of identifying your own tools and keeping them separate from other people’s tools.