Andrew, a medical student, writes,

“I recently got a tattoo of Penicillin G on my arm.  As someone who stumbled into medical school as a non-traditional student after a few career missteps, I appreciate a good mistake.  There are few mistakes that were as amazing and important to medicine as the ‘discovery’ of Penicillin.  Had Alexander Fleming remembered to close his laboratory’s window, who knows where we would be in the fight against infectious disease?”

In case you missed my announcement over the summer, the Science Tattoo Emporium is going to become a book. Tentatively entitled Science Ink, it will be published next fall by Sterling. The images will be accompanied by some of my own reflections on the tattoos, in which I will unpack the inside jokes and strange histories of the science behind the pictures.

The ultimate purpose of the book, like the Emporium, will be to illustrate the passion that science can inspire. To that end, I also plan to donate a portion of the proceeds from the book to DonorsChoose, a great organization that funds science projects in the classroom.

To those who have already appeared in the emporium, and to those who have kept their sleeves tightly buttoned till now, I’d like to extend an invitation to submit your photograph. If you’re interested, please contact me for the instructions from my publisher.

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Melinda writes,

I have attached a photo of my Dirac Equation tattoo, which I obtained a few months ago. I am really happy with it. In fact, it caused quite a stir at the Yuri’s Night celebration at NASA Ames. I’m a physics student and research at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I currently conduct research analyzing gamma ray radiation from astronomical sources (blazars and pulsars mainly) with Cerenkov detectors located in Amado, Arizona…Side Note: The equation was written up on a LaTeX document and stenciled from there. Doesn’t get much nerdier than that!

In case you missed my announcement over the summer, the Science Tattoo Emporium is going to become a book. Tentatively entitled Science Ink, it will be published next fall by Sterling. The images will be accompanied by some of my own reflections on the tattoos, in which I will unpack the inside jokes and strange histories of the science behind the pictures.

The ultimate purpose of the book, like the Emporium, will be to illustrate the passion that science can inspire. To that end, I also plan to donate a portion of the proceeds from the book to DonorsChoose, a great organization that funds science projects in the classroom.

To those who have already appeared in the emporium, and to those who have kept their sleeves tightly buttoned till now, I’d like to extend an invitation to submit your photograph. If you’re interested, please contact me for the instructions from my publisher. We will need the image and the paperwork back by October 1, 2010.

It doesn’t get much nerdier than that.

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

It was three years ago to the day that I wondered out loud whether scientists wore tattoos of their science. The result was a resounding yes, and that yes turned into the Science Tattoo Emporium. And today, I’m pleased to announce, the emporium is going to turn into a book.

The book, tentatively entitled Science Ink, will be published next year by Sterling. The images will be accompanied by some of my own reflections on the tattoos, in which I will unpack the inside jokes and strange histories of the science behind the pictures.

The ultimate purpose of the book, like the Emporium, will be to illustrate the passion that science can inspire. To that end, I also plan to donate a portion of the proceeds from the book to DonorsChoose, a great organization that funds science projects in the classroom.

If you have a tattoo that you’d like me to consider for inclusion for the book, please get in touch. I’ll send you the paperwork and instructions for submission of a book-ready image. I will also be getting directly in touch with people whose tattoos I have already posted here and which I’d like to include in Science Ink. We will need the image and the paperwork back byOctober 1, 2010. October 15, 2010.

(P.S.: And for those of you who hate tattoos, no matter how scientifically inspired, stay tuned. I’ll have news of a tattoo-free book in the not-too-distant future.)

Maria, a paleontologist, writes, “Archaeopteryx, to me, represents a beautiful example of a transition fossil and of evolution in general, showing characters that both
dinosaurs and birds share.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Melissa writes,

I have a mathematical tattoo on my left forearm. It’s in Frege’s notation (from “Grundgesetze der Arithmetik”), which was one of the first modern logical notations. If it were written on a flat surface, it would start with the short vertical line, which is the assertion sign. What it asserts is: If {Cantor’s theorem} then {heart}.

Cantor’s Theorem says that the power set of any set is strictly larger than the set itself. (The power set of a set is the set of all its subsets.) For finite sets, this is pretty obvious; for example, the power set of {1,2} is {{}, {1}, {2}, {1,2}}. In general, if a finite set has n members, its power set has 2^n. But Cantor’s Theorem is also true for *infinite* sets, which is kind of unexpected. After all, the set of all even numbers is the same size as the set of all numbers — why does the power set of the set of all numbers have to be bigger?

That’s why the proof of the theorem is so cool. It proves it for finite sets and infinite sets, no matter how huge, at the same time. You start by assuming that some arbitrary set S has the same number of members as its power set P(S). That is, assume there’s a one-one function f which maps the members of S to the members of P(S). Now consider the set D, which consists of all and only the members of S that don’t get mapped to a set of which they’re a member. (So, for instance, if 7 is a member of S, and f(7) = {4, 5, 12}, then 7 is in D because it’s not a member of f(7).) D is a subset of S, so it’s a member of P(S). That means that f maps some member of S, call it d, to D. But: is d in D or not? If it is, then it’s a member of f(d), so by the definition of D, it’s not in D. If it’s not in D, then it’s not a member of f(d), so, again by the definition of D, it’s in D. Either way leads to a contradiction, and there’s only one way out: it’s not possible to have a one-one function from any set to its power set. QED! (Of course, you also have to prove that P(S) can’t be *smaller* than S, but that’s easy.)

When I saw how short and simple (and beautiful!) the proof of such a powerful theorem was, I knew I could spend the rest of my life doing set theory and logic. So last year, when I got my bachelor’s degree in philosophy and went on to grad school, I celebrated by getting the theorem tattooed on my arm. As for the tattoo itself, it’s easiest to read from the bottom. The stuff on the right-hand side of the ‘=’ means: for all a, if a is in r, then a is in u. (In other words, r is a subset of u.) The whole bottom line means: for all r, r is in v if and only if it’s a subset of u. (So v is the power set of u.) The bottom line and the one above it together mean: if v is the power set of u, then v is strictly bigger than u. So those two lines state Cantor’s Theorem, and the whole tattoo means: if Cantor’s Theorem, then {heart}. (Incidentally, I got that heart symbol from an illustration in “Alice in Wonderland”. It’s the top of the King of Hearts’s crown.)

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Kristin writes,
“This is a rendition of Andreas Vesalius’ ‘The Quivering Brain.’ I admired many of his anatomy studies in art school, as I spent fifteen years as a painter, but I was always a little more interested in science than art. I even considered a career as a medical illustrator at one point.

Using science as artistic reference and researching for a painting was my favorite part of painting. Actually, it was the only thing I really enjoyed. It took me many years to realize this. I got this tattoo right before going back to school to study neuroscience. It couldn’t be more perfect.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Gabriel writes, “I’m a Brazilian biologist. I had the idea of tattooing a neural net as a form of tribute to scientific, logical thinking and the rational understanding of the world.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Billy Hudson, a mathematician, writes, “I was in a introductory Number Theory class when Professor David Ferguson told me that e^(ipi) + 1 = 0. Of course, Euler’s equation had the same affect on me as it has on many undergraduate mathematicians, i.e. I was hooked. I had the equation tattooed on my arm in May of 1998, thinking that if nothing else it would be unique. I’ve still yet to meet anyone else with the tattoo, but as your site shows, there are others (although I still think I may have been the first .”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Matt writes, “I took an alternate path to understanding the world from most of your readers. I switched from psychology to history in order to better research what really happened as opposed to what kids are taught in school. A concept that stuck with me and in fact is a critical reference point for me in every day life is our tendency to seek patterns and to see things that aren’t there. As a tribute to the fallibility of our complex brains my first tattoo is a visualization of the Gestalt Law of Closure.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Susan, a graduate student, writes,

I got my tattoo in 2008 after raising enough money by carrying around a jar marked “tattoo fund” as I bar hopped for my 21st birthday. The tattoo is of a Permian cephalopod from the Guadalupe Mountains of Texas, Cooperoceras texanum.

I have loved paleontology for as long as I can remember. When I was looking at colleges, I came across a program called “Earth, Life, and Time” at the University of Maryland. It was a 2 year program as a part of an honors living and learning program called College Park Scholars. ELT was run by two amazing paleontologists, Dr. Tom Holtz and Dr. John Merck. The program was what convinced me to go to UMD and without these two great professors, I might not even be alive today. They are not only wonderful human beings, but also some of the greatest teachers at the university. Of all the classes with a natural history or evolutionary focus offered at the university, the classes they taught were truly of the highest caliber. To honor them, I got the mascot of the Earth, Life, and Time program, Cooperoceras texanum, tattooed on my leg. Unfortunately, the program is no longer offered at the university, due to shifting research goals in the the Geology Department, but Dr. Merck and Dr. Holtz now run a new program called “Science and Global Change”. ELT remains in the hearts and minds of the decade worth of students who came through it’s classroom.

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Between scrambling to finish some big projects and avoiding summer brain-fry, I haven’t been doing much science blogging recently. And now I’ll be taking a few days away from blogging altogether. It’s not a blackout at the Loom, though; just a brown-out. I’m going to schedule some old posts I’m fond of, as well as a backlog of science tattoos. Later this month I’ll be rested, refreshed, and ready to blog anew.

[Image: Weegee/Amber Online]

Caitlin, a graduate student, writes:

About four years ago, a close friend from college got her first tattoo – something meaningful and marking a particular point in her life – and she asked me if I would ever get one. I said sure, but that at that point in my life there was nothing I could come up with that was meaningful enough to have permanently etched in my skin. That was my first year of graduate school and I was still very unsure of myself and my future.

Four years of graduate school later finds me in the final stages of earning a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology – a place I was not convinced I was cut out to reach at the start of graduate school. After 2009′s year of Darwin celebrations, including my own involvement organizing a conference celebrating 150 years of evolutionary biology, the perfect tattoo came to me in class one day in March, and I found myself at the tattoo parlor by the end of that week.

My tattoo is Darwin’s very first phylogeny, from his Notebook B on Transmutation of Species and it is on my right shoulder. These notebooks contained much of his brainstorming on evolution after returning from the Beagle, and I was able to see this one in person at the American Museum of Natural History’s Darwin exhibit in 2006. I also added his signature and the date which can be found on the inside cover of the notebook.

I chose this particular piece of Darwinia for several reasons. As a perpetual student of science and of nature in particular, I love the slight hesitation and perhaps excitement in the “I think.” I am amazed that Darwin was thinking about phylogenies in 1837, 22 years before the Origin was published – that you can see the seed of his great work (and the preface to the only figure in the Origin) so early in his writings. The phylogeny itself as an image is meaningful because I study speciation, and spend a great deal of time studying, thinking about, and building my own phylogenies. I had also selected it to be part of the cover of the program for the conference I was involved in, and many attendees asked me about it.  In short – it carries a lot of meaning to me.

So, my tattoo honors Darwin, the father of my field; it represents my own personal research; and it exemplifies the slight hesitation and excitement of scientific discovery that I hope will stay with me always as I launch my academic career. It is a mark of confidence, in myself, and my chosen profession. I have no doubt that I will never regret permanently etching this image on my skin, and I know that it will serve as a reminder to me that even though the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a long, sometimes daunting journey, I love what I do and I can’t imagine doing anything else.

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.