....
Ok so thats happening now, I guess.
Anyways; On The subject of prefixes and suffixes and making the stuff more of a written language:
This is an interesting idea and might work fine, although it would also be a bit harder to interpret as people throw things together in ways they make much less sense. For instance the example of "crystal fire claws attach to hand" would in all likelihood be given more as " To hand, fire, attach, crystal, claws".
And something important to remember is that the system is being designed in such a way as to allow it to be assigned things other then words to represent elements. Things like runes, alchemical reagents, body movements and the like. And while you could sort of force those things to fit with the idea of suffixes and prefixes and such, having them just attached to whole words does seem like a way to greatly cut down on complexity. Which is the goal here, to have a very simple sort of free form magic.
Although I do understand the importance of having words to dictate what objects shoot as their ammo and how to attach things to people.
On a related note, I was thinking of adding a series of words related to the tattoo ones; Mutate words that targeted specific body parts or the whole, like tattoos. They would basically work like tattoos but be a bit more organic. Ie if someone used "Mutate left arm fire" it would mutate their left arm into an organic flame thrower or cause it's skin to blacken and it's pores to enlarge and begin spitting out little flames.