[Editor’s note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we’ll spend the next two weekends revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published November 8, 2011.] Back in 2007, after spying a colleague with DNA-inspired ink at a party, Discover Magazine’s Carl Zimmer asked his blog readers whether any of the scientists among them were sporting similar tattoo odes to their work. Perhaps surprisingly, the response was overwhelming. “Without intending it, I became a curator of tattoos, a scholar of science ink,” he explains. “Tattoo enthusiast magazines called to interview me. All in all, it was a strange experience; I have no tattoos of my own and no intention of getting any. But the open question I posed brought a river of pleasures.” A collection of the photos that Zimmer received as a result of his query — which range from a tattoo of Darwin’s finches to a pair of colorful odes to Halley’s Comet — were published earlier this month in a new book called Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed. Click through to check out a slide show featuring some of our favorite science-inspired ink.
Dave Wolfeden with a jellyfish. Adapted from Science Ink by Carl Zimmer © Sterling Publishing co., Inc. 2011
Dave Stroup with the Golden Ratio. Adapted from Science Ink by Carl Zimmer © Sterling Publishing co., Inc. 2011
Heather Wilkinson with the Voyager space probe. Adapted from Science Ink by Carl Zimmer © Sterling Publishing co., Inc. 2011
Noah Radford with a plaque of digitally encoded images from the Voyager space probe. Adapted from Science Ink by Carl Zimmer © Sterling Publishing co., Inc. 2011
Gabriel Pato with the neural net. Adapted from Science Ink by Carl Zimmer © Sterling Publishing co., Inc. 2011
Rachel Crews with Darwin’s finches. Adapted from Science Ink by Carl Zimmer © Sterling Publishing co., Inc. 2011
Drew Lucas with the Continuity Equation. Adapted from Science Ink by Carl Zimmer © Sterling Publishing co., Inc. 2011
MRL with the universe, the Golden Ratio, the quantum nature of life, DNA, and the tree of life. Adapted from Science Ink by Carl Zimmer © Sterling Publishing co., Inc. 2011
Kate Devitt and partner with Halley’s Comet. Adapted from Science Ink by Carl Zimmer © Sterling Publishing co., Inc. 2011
Alexander Claxton with an ammonite fossil. Adapted from Science Ink by Carl Zimmer © Sterling Publishing co., Inc. 2011
Andy Gates with a bike-related equation. Adapted from Science Ink by Carl Zimmer © Sterling Publishing co., Inc. 2011
Martin Roth with the neural net symbol. Adapted from Science Ink by Carl Zimmer © Sterling Publishing co., Inc. 2011
Tyler Rollings with a drawing of Edison’s patent for a recording device. Adapted from Science Ink by Carl Zimmer © Sterling Publishing co., Inc. 2011
Siobhan Braybook with the Golden Ratio. Adapted from Science Ink by Carl Zimmer © Sterling Publishing co., Inc. 2011
Brandon Davis with the Golden Ratio. Adapted from Science Ink by Carl Zimmer © Sterling Publishing co., Inc. 2011