LabKitty Recommends: Science Ink

The days when only dangerous folks have tattoos are waning, membership in the Yakuza or Hell's Angels no longer a prerequisite to "get ink done" as the Offspring say. So why not scientists? We're not typically dangerous individually, what with our slight torsos and little garter snake arms, although we do remain dangerous in the abstract. Just about everything ever invented, from calculus to 5-axis NC, was immediately put to use devising more efficient ways to kill each other. Heck, most scientists have things in their lab freezer that could wipe out the Eastern seaboard. Not that any of us would. Just, you know, don't make us angry.

Enter Carl Zimmer's Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed. A coffee table book with lots and lots of glossy photos of kindred spirits sporting various science-themed tattoos both iconic and obscure. Each entry comes with a bio blurb of the subject and a review of the relevant background. Equations, molecules, and trilobites are popular, but all of the major topics get a chapter -- math, physics, chemistry, astronomy, earth sciences, evolution, neuroscience, with some hard-to-classify works collected in the final chapters "nomenclature" and "what the mind makes." The artistry on display ranges from humble to holy freakin' cow, the latter category including some spectacular protein structural models and a number of Darwin arm sleeves. Should you have any lingering prudish misgivings, I assure you the poses are all modest in the extreme. Nothing you need keep hidden from the kids. More Mary Curie than Kat Von D.

So if you've ever wondered what our esteemed scientists are wearing under those lab coats as they ponder and titrate, Carl Zimmer has your answer. If 300 could get teenagers interested in reading Herodotus, who knows what some buff kitty sporting a Schrodinger's equation across their attractive parts might do for our nation's sagging SAT scores.

See Science Ink on Amazon