Carl Zimmer's Science Tattoo Emporium

Crashing Waves

Aarn writes: "as a student of electrical and mechanical engineering I kept running into sine waves and the unit circle, and came to realize how important it is. After about a year of digging and trying to find the right artist and the right technical drawings to illustrate this concept, I settled on two images which at one time or another were featured in scientific american magazine. The inner arm is a sine wave as it relates to the unit circle, and I continued the wave theme on the whole arm piece with the outer image which is the superposition of two waves. In the background is kind of a broken-out grid that wraps around my arm and onto my shoulder and has other solid and dotted lines in it."

The Mark of the Iceman

Mike writes: "Otzi was discovered on a glacier in the Austrian-Italian alps by a couple of hikers - his body was well-preserved along with many of his possessions. On his skin there were something like 50 tattoos, I got 10 of the lines on my back in the same place he had his. -- I figure you can spiff up the facts when you actually blog this.

Anyway, Otzi was human, 100% human, 100% genetically identical to modern humans today, genetically identical to us, to me. Despite being the same species, we live in a completely different way than he does. My dad worked in an office for 35 years, all my friends work in offices, I was expected to work in an office... so I got this tattoo to remind me that regardless of what our current, blinkofaneye society expects from me, I'm still a human and whatever choice I make is ok. If I want to cross the alps on foot, that doesn't make me any less legitimate than my office-dwelling friends. I got the tattoo to link me to an ancestral human, to pre-industrial revolution (though unfortunately post-agricultural revolution) people. We can never go back, of course, but as Thoreau wrote, 'There are as many ways to live as radii can be drawn from the center of a circle.'"

Carl: For more on Otzi, the 5300-year old man exposed by our warming climate, see Wikipedia and this tattoo site. This article from 1994 in the New York Times notes that the marks on Otzi's back may have actually been acupuncture rather than some kind of display. But for Mike, it's all tattoo. (Same for Brad Pitt.)

The Illustrated Swamp

Maureen writes: "I am a PhD student in Ecology. I have toiled away the years of my dissertation working in wetlands across Ohio. The extended exposure to methane gases and gallons of blood donated to mosquitoes, ticks and leeches inspired my tattoo. In addition to the clear inspiration from my habitat of choice, each item in the tattoo symbolizes a very personal analogy in my own life - past, present and future. I'm pretty sure only nerds among wetland nerds can figure it out. Anyway, as you can see it's still a work in progress. I have 18 hours in so far and have been working on it for two years. Only a wetland ecologist with a penchant for entomology would sit for such a tedious process, right?"

Here's a life list...

Sphagnum moss (Sphagnum sp.),

Rat-tailed maggot (Sryphidae Eristalis tenax),

Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus),

Green Darner Dragonfly (Aeshnidae Anax junus),

Cardinal Flower (Lobelia cardinalis),

Field Horsetail (Equisetum arvense),

Blunt Spike Rush (Eleocharis obtusa),

Canadian waterweed (Elodea canadensis)

Nitrogen As Horse, Earth, And Air

Matthew writes, "My tattoo is taken from a 1950's biology textbook. The reason it means so much to me is because of the relevence of the nitrogen cycle to the cycle of life. The horse dies, which feeds the plant, which feeds the horse. Its really quite beautiful."

Carl writes: We are each fleeting intersections of the Earth's biogeochemical cycles, the paths of nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, and the other elements. The carbon cycle is the most familiar of those cycles today, because we are adjusting its knobs so that more carbon is shooting into the atmosphere than was the case before the Industrial Revolution, trapping heat from the sun. If we were to shut the knob off, atmospheric carbon would slowly subside over hundreds of thousands of years as it flowed further on through the carbon cycle, to the bottom of the ocean and ultimately into the bowels of the Earth.

The nitrogen cycle is important as well, and we are also adjusting its knobs. Today the nitrogen entering the world's soil is moving at twice its natural rate, thanks to our production of fertilizers and burning of fossil fuels. The nitrogen that gets into streams flows out to the oceans where it triggers runaway explosions of microbes, leading to oxygen-free "dead zones" in places like the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. These dead zones would be far bigger if not for the help we get from a hidden part of the nitrogren cycle--bacteria in the soil and banks of streams and rivers. Some of these microbes have the biochemical wherewithal to pull nitrogen out of the water and turn it into molecular nitrogen or nitrous oxygen (N20), which diffuses into the air. But these bacteria cannot turn the knobs all the way back; the more nitrogen they are given, the less efficient they get at converting it. As the world's population grows and releases more nitrogen, the hidden parts of its cycle may come painfully to light.

[Image via Wikipedia]

Think Periodically

Jen writes: "Out of my interest for Chemistry and my heritage I chose to get his tattoo done almost a year ago. It is on the back of my upper right shoulder and it is a reminder of my philosophy for life "question all objectively."

The Surface of Things

Greg writes, "I'm currently a Ph.D. student studying maths in Australia (submitting next week). The the tattoo on the top, I got about three years ago in Berkeley, CA. The other tattoo I got about a year later in Sydney, Australia. Both these tattoos are closely related to the research I've done for my Ph.D., which is in the area of elliptic partial differential equations. The top equation is called the Monge-Ampere equation and is the archetype of the equations I currently study. The bottom equation is called the 'Infinity Laplacian' and was chosen because it is correlated to variational theories which I find to be beautiful. Loosely speaking these equations are correlated to how surfaces (in arbitrary dimension) bend and curve. I figured since I did half my Ph.D. in the US and half in Australia, I would get at least one tattoo in each of those countries. The tattoos are meant to represent a memory of the time I spent in my studies."

Shouldering The Risks

Steve writes, "I got my two tattoos the summer after I graduated from the University of Massachusetts with a degree in Chemical and Nuclear Engineering. On the left shoulder is the recognizable radiation warning trefoil, and on the right is the U.S. Army's hazard symbol for chemical weapons (I interpret it more as a general chemical warning symbol). Some would say that hazard symbols like these represent a desire to for isolation, but I like to think of them as my two pillars of training. That no matter what happens to me I'll always have my knowledge of these two sciences to rest upon."

Anatomy of a Bench-Press

Julian writes

Attached is my tattoo of the 17β-hydroxyandrost-4-en-3-one molecule a.k.a testosterone. I got it a couple of years ago after many years of thinking about getting it. I have a degree in biotechnology and am currently undertaking honours in molecular biology. I am studying the effects of glucocorticoids on fetal lung development.

The tat has to do with my love of lifting heavy weights and the most important molecule for that is testosterone. People can take all the synthetic testosterones and steroid derivatives they want but nothing feels better than knowing after a heavy lift that all you used was that which your testes produced.

I also like to look at it and draw inspiration or just contemplate. I contemplate on what it is to be a man and what it means to be masculine and that it's about strength of character and not just being strong. The best thing about it is that it's unique and brings a smile when I tell people what it is - crazy scientists!

Dead Ends and Interesting Aunts

Jim describes his tattoo: "a design of Opabinia regalis, a Burgess Shale fossil dating from the Cambrian. It has some pirate imagery, including the hourglass, skull, and nukes. As an evolutionary dead end, Opabinia reminds me of the diversity and tenacity of life through difficulty (how do you put 'Ad Astra Per Aspera' into fossil terms?), and plus it looks awesome."

Carl: Opabinia is the weirdest of the weird, a creature with five eyes and a single appendage sticking out of its head like the arm of a backhoe. It existed half a billion years ago, and its fossil remains were preserved exquisitely in the Burgess Shale formation of Canada. Because it looks unlike anything alive today, it can seem like a dead end. But it would be a mistake to separate it entirely from the animal kingdom. In fact, it shares many traits with living arthropods, a group that includes insects and crustaceans. And while the five eyes and single head arm haven't survived as far as we know, Opabinia was part of a transition from ancient forms to the arthropod body plan seen today. Its legs, for example, offer clues to how a single appendage branched in two. So while there may be no living descendants of Opabinia, they still have something to tell us about life today.

The Universe Is Pocked

"Backstory: my parents met at a wedding on July 20, 1969, a very important date in the annals of human scientific achievement - the night humans first set foot on the moon. All my life, I have had a fascination with the moon not just as a tangible, graspable place (science fiction made real) but as a symbol for what the human race can achieve when we apply the best abilities of the best minds."

Carl: The moon was science's first glimpse of cosmic imperfection. For centuries, natural philosophers declared the heavens to be beyond decay and change. Everyone could see that the mooon was irregularly colored, but they explained it away in various ways--perhaps the reflection of the Earth itself, or the glint of sunlight bouncing off of celestial vapors. But when Galileo turned his telescope towards the moon, he saw clearly the moon's pock-like craters, changing with the shifting shadows. The moon is not timeless, but mature, its battered face the sign of experience; astronomy no longer has the purity of mathematics, but the fascinating quirks of biography.