Printing of color imagery onto a rewritable color surface (e.g. electronic paper or human skin tattooed with electrophoretic ink) is accomplished by providing an applicator with an alignment subsystem capable of sensing an alignment marker (e.g. color response, non-visible response or secondary emission) of one or more colors dots from multiple local color dot patterns as the applicator scans the surface to align the applicators print head to the local color dot patterns. The alignment subsystem uses the sensed alignment markers to align the state values for the corresponding portion of the color image to the individual color dots in the local color dot patterns on said surface. Alignment may be achieved by mapping the state values for a particular color dot in the color image to an individual head that is aligned to a particular color dot or by micro-actuating a pattern of print heads with pre-assigned state values to align with the local color dot patterns.
