Scientific tattoos

"Underneath their sober lab coats and flannel shirts, scientists hide images of their scientific passions. Here they are revealed to all."

Via the Dinosaur Mailing List I came across this great blog of scientific tattoos - Carl Zimmer's Science Tattoo Emporium

Here's a selection of those that caught my eye.

Claire d'Alberto of the University of Melbourne writes, "I would like to share what my friends call my 'science nerd' tattoo with you! I am currently doing my PhD in Zoology and have been fascinated by the biological world for as long I can remember, so when I decided to get a tattoo it seemed logical that I look within my field for inspiration....It took 4.5 hours, and certainly didn't tickle, but I love that I have such a beautiful representation of evolution and the natural world with me all the time."

The pictures around the tree represent the five kingdoms--Monera (bacteria), Protista (amoebae and other single-celled organisms), Plantae (plants), Fungi (illustrated here by yeast and the penicillin mold), and animals (a comb jelly, a mollusc, a starfish, and a seadragon fish).

Here is a picture of my serotonin tattoo. I don't know that it needs much more explanation than it's my favorite neurotransmitter.--Hayley

"It is an approximation of the locus of connectedness for the Julia sets of the family of functions f(z) = z^2 + lambda/(z^2) (rotated by pi/2). This is analogous to the standard Mandelbrot set (which applies to the family f(z) = z^2 + c), but holds additional fascination because for lambda values which are in the interior of one of the subdomains of the connectedness locus, the Julia set is a Universal Curve. To me this represents the structure unifying chaos (since Julia sets are chaotic) and order (since Universal Curves act as a sort of catalog of all planar curves)." --Aaron

Amanda, a biologist, writes, "Here's my science tattoo. It's inspired from the REM song Man on the Moon and by trip to the Galapagos a few years ago."

And as Darwin is a personal hero of mine, here's another:

"Attached is a photo of a tattoo I got immediately after turning in the final paperwork a little over two weeks ago for the completion of my Ph.D. in biological anthropology. It's the first evolutionary tree that Darwin sketched in his 1837 Notebook B on the transmutation of species." --Julienne

And finally, a tat by somebody who, unlike Jacques Lacan, knows what a Mobius Strip actually is:


" I am a Rocket Scientist (Friends Named me that, more like
Mechanical Engineer) and an Amatuer Astronomer. Got this tattoo on my inner right arm, since the Science inside of me is screaming to come out. Going to get another related Tattoo on my left inner arm next year. Not really going much further than that (as far as I know). " --Spacemanbobby