Science Tattoos

I'm finding that my post on science tattoos is getting troublesome now that I've added in so many images. Slow to load, easily bugged. Update: Ignore the stuff below about Picaca. I'm going to Flickr. The home for the set, with comments, is here. And you can subscribe to an RSS feed of sciencetattoo tagged images here, to keep up with the collection's additions. So I'm experimenting with an album on Picasa. I will continue to add images to it as people send them in, and will include captions from the comments that come with them. If you click on an individual image, you get the caption with…
A reader writes: This is my friend, Ira Klotzko, he's got a doc. in Physics and a great sense of humor. I won't share his original plan for the depiction of Uranus... One we can share is how he jokes that the tattoo is really accurate because, as is the case with his waistline, the universe is always expanding. Into the science tattoo hall of fame it goes...
Okay. So, the other day I asked an innocuous question about whether scientists get scientific tattoos. I also invited people to send in their own example. I didn't quite bank on this site becoming a clearinghouse for science tattoos. The traffic of readers coming in from reddit, etc., is startling enough. But the stream of tattoo pictures coming into my inbox is causing me to freak out, ever so slightly. Seriously, think about this: people with Ph.D.'s, who study esoteric aspects of physics and insect neurology are baring flesh, snapping pictures, and sending them to me, a stranger. Just…
&otYesterday I asked whether many scientists tattooed themselves with their science. The answer is yes, at least for about a dozen people who responded with their own bodywork, which now appears at the end of the post. Here's the latest, from an invertebrate biologist. As a tattoo-free person, I keep wondering, when does the screaming stop?
The other day I was pondering how scientists tattoo themselves with their science. I was at a pool party where a friend, Bob Datta, had jumped into the water with his kids. Datta is a post-doc at Columbia, where he studies genes in Drosophila flies. I noticed that Bob had a tattoo of DNA on his shoulder. At first I thought it was a generic snippet of the molecule, but then Bob told me that it actually represents, in the genetic code, his wife's initials: EEE. Geek love in its noblest form. [For the gorey specifics, see Bob's comment below.] Bob's tatoo reminded me that I have seen other…