Richard writes, “On my shoulder. Taken from an engraving by Ernest Haekel.”
Carl: Here’s the Wikipedia page on diatoms, those abundant microscopic shell-builders of the sea. And here’s a gallery of Haeckel’s amazing illustrations—many tattoos in the making (and made, in some cases).
“This is another Haeckel- a brittle star. I am a physical chemist, but I’ve always admired Haeckel’s obsessive use of visual and design analogy to bolster his (useful, but not entirely correct) ideas about evolution. ” -Aurelia Honerkamp-Smith, PhD student, University of Washington.
“I’m a biochemist, but I’ve always been fascinated by evolution. Here’s my tattoo representing the tree of life, based loosely on a couple of phylogenetic trees drawn by Ernst Haeckel. Here it is attached to the pictures that inspired it.”–Kevin
“This is a Tubulariae organism penned by the German biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel . Flower-like – it is in fact a marine organism – I love the ambiguity. The image can be found in Haeckel’s original grand publication Kunstformen der natur (1904) . A stunning book.” – Science journalist.
Carl Zimmer writes about science regularly for the New York Times and magazines such as Discover, where he is a contributing editor and columnist.
He is the author of seven books, the most recent of which is The Tangled Bank: An Introduction To Evolution. His website is carlzimmer.com and his address is [ blog at carlzimmer dot com ].
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