A few years back, I noticed a DNA tattoo on the arm of a neuroscientist. He informed me that it spelled out his wife’s initials according to the genetic code. And that enchanting discovery turned me, much to my own surprise, into an amateur anthropologist of scientist body art and the author of Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed. (Reviews)

I’ve archived the ~300 tattoos here at National Geographic so that future generations of researchers can analyze them for clues to the folkways of scientists and the scientifically-minded in the early twenty-first century. And I’m still getting fresh ink via email. I will continue to post them here on Saturdays. (The tattoo-averse can thus