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.” [Tattooist's site: http://www.eternalinstinct.com/]
Carl: The tree of life has changed shape over the years. On another tattoo, you can see a nineteenth century version, its branches reaching upward through time. Today, scientists use DNA to draw the branches of thousands of species at a time. To make space for them all, the scientists must stretch the tree out into a wheel. Claire modeled her tree after a 3,000-species tree created by David Hillis at the University of Texas. She did not have all 3,000 species tattooed on her, obviously, but this simplified version captures the overall shape of the tree. 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). Of course, even 3,000 species is only a tiny fraction of the full diversity of life–1.8 million known species, and perhaps 10 or 20 million more to be discovered. If the current trends of discovery hold up, most of that diversity will be made up of bacteria. So future tattoos will need more microbes, and fewer seadragons.
February 22nd, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Now that is a really cool tat.
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:41 pm
I would never have thought of turning a phylogram into a tattoo, but that’s a very pretty way of doing it.
March 29th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
As a soon-to-be graduate in biology myself, I am thinking about getting a tree like this, but encircled with dna.
May 13th, 2009 at 3:27 am
You win, madam.
November 30th, 2010 at 6:56 am
Get in! I have a Glaucus atlanticus* tattoo on my left leg, on the right of my shin! Go go, nudibranch tats!
(*PS – this is the ‘winged’ slug thing at the top (ever so slightly to the right) only mine is much lager, and more stylised)
March 27th, 2011 at 11:36 am
I saw this tattoo in Richard Dawkins’ book “Greatest Show on Earth”. Beautiful.