Science on our sleeves: the research that inspires our tattoos

Inked scientists choose scientific images to mark career accomplishments and illustrate their research passion

Biologist Liz Haynes’s plant tattoo reminds her of an inspiring mentor.Credit: Justin Kibbel

Kristin Barry had wanted a tattoo for years, so when she finished her neuroscience PhD in 2019, she knew it was time. “It made sense that once I had my PhD, I would commemorate it this way,” she says. Barry’s research focused mainly on hearing-loss disorders, such as tinnitus, and she spent a lot of time looking at auditory thalamus neurons, the nerve cells that help to process sound. These were often stained using the Golgi method, highlighting the neuron’s cell body and dendrites that resemble tree roots and tendrils — and would make for a good fine-line tattoo.

In 2021, she got the tattoo — aptly, behind her ear. “I really didn’t expect my tattoo to play as much of a part in my identity, but it just felt right,” says Barry, who is now a research fellow at the University of Western Australia and Curtin University in Perth.

She’s not alone. Many scientists mark research accomplishments and career milestones by heading to a tattoo parlour.

“It’s one thing to put on your CV ‘I wrote a paper on this topic’, but it’s another thing to say ‘I’m going to put this on my skin and carry it around with me for the rest of my life’,” says science journalist Carl Zimmer, author of the 2011 book Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed. “It’s a different level of connection.”

Behind the ink

The inspiration for Zimmer’s book came from an unlikely place: a pool party for his nephew. The kids and parents were all jumping in the water, and it was the first time that he noticed that one of his friends had a tattoo on his shoulder.

“He’s a neuroscientist, and he started to explain to me how he had written out the initials of his wife in genetic code,” recounts Zimmer, who doesn’t have any tattoos himself. Zimmer thought, “that is extremely geeky, but still cool”.

*Science Ink* by Carl Zimmer features hundreds of photos of tattooed scientists.Credit: Carl Zimmer / Union Square & Co

At the time, Zimmer was an avid blogger. With permission, he posted a picture of his friend’s tattoo, asking if this was a common thing among scientists.

“These scientists who I talked to were usually wearing shirts and black coats,” he says. “Maybe they had tattoos as well that I didn’t know about.”

Zimmer was quickly flooded with e-mails and photos from tattooed scientists, which led him to do a more concerted call-out for his book. Although the book featured only about 300 designs, Zimmer estimates that he saw 1,000 science tattoos over the years. There were many bodies adorned with double-stranded DNA helixes. Some bore Darwin’s finches, the birds whose study helped Charles Darwin to demonstrate his theory of evolution. Others had Albert Einstein’s signature mass–energy equivalence formula, E = mc². The tattoos spanned all scientific disciplines and many, Zimmer discovered, were specific and deeply significant only to the wearer.

Yoshi Maezumi’s tattoo sleeve captures a snapshot of her research career. It started with a drawing of a species of hummingbird native to the Amazon rainforest — Maezumi’s PhD at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City was on palaeoecology in the region. But over time, the design grew to include other species she was studying.

“I was working with the same artist for about three years, and any time I felt like I really wanted to include something that I was studying, or a new plant species that came up in my work, we would add it,” says Maezumi, who joined the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, in 2022.

Although she doesn’t always notice her tattoos in the mirror any more — something she says is true of many people with them — they’re a way to immortalize special moments. And whereas some of her tattoos are science-related, she also has tattoos commemorating important people in her life.

“Tattoos, to me, are really personal and like, sentimental memories, almost like journalling or a scrapbook of things that I’ve been collecting along the way,” she says.

Many of the tattoos adorning Matt Taylor, a physicist at the European Space Agency (ESA) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, are not science-themed. But his right leg, which he calls his “mission leg”, boasts designs that relate to two important career milestones: the Cluster mission, the first to investigate how the Sun’s solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetic field in 3D, and Rosetta, which was the first mission to rendezvous, orbit and deploy a lander on a comet.

“When I joined Rosetta in 2013, I’d come in just before the spacecraft came out of hibernation,” he explained. “When you move into a team like that, which has quite a long history, you have to kind of convince them that you’re committed to supporting them. And so I actually made a vow that if Rosetta came out of hibernation, I would get the tattoo done.”

Liz Haynes, an biologist in the Department of Cell and Regenerative Biology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, also got a tattoo to mark a pivotal moment in her scientific career. The image, of the plant she studied in her undergraduate laboratory, serves as a reminder of the positive experience and the lessons she learnt from her mentor at the time.

“One of the things that I took away was that I really wanted to be that for someone in the future, help show them the pathway on this career, help guide them into grad school, influence them positively and really give them a home in the lab,” she explains.

Professional perception

All of the tattooed scientists interviewed for this article alluded to their body art coming across as unprofessional to some people and potentially as job-inhibiting. In the early 2010s, when Yesenia Arroyo was getting a set of planetary symbols tattooed on their forearm, they were unsure of how it would be perceived. They already had a tattoo down their spine, but this was the first tattoo that would be fully visible in a professional setting.

“I remember being nervous that was going to exclude me from jobs. People were going to look at me and be like, ‘Well, that’s not professional,’” says Arroyo, a research assistant and communications specialist at NASA in Greenbelt, Maryland, who also sports a tattoo with the electron configurations for both carbon and oxygen on the inside of their arm.

In 2014, ESA asked Taylor to cover up his tattoos at a large media event (although the agency later started using them as a talking point to promote the science). Taylor notes that the tattoo sleeve on his arm was a “big step”.

“I already kind of had a permanent position, so I think I would have been more reluctant if I was still looking for a job,” he says.

But the prejudice towards tattoos is changing, and they are becoming more common. “I feel like it’s definitely gotten a lot more relaxed, and that might just be people in the field getting younger, so we probably share a lot of the same values,” Arroyo says.

The planetary symbols on research assistant Yesenia Arroyo’s arms often start conversations with non-scientists.Credit: Daniel Zarzuela Perez

Todd Disotell, a biological anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who was featured in Zimmer’s book, also sees a generational divide in tattoos. The 62-year-old got his first tattoo — a DNA double helix — for his 40th birthday. And after biting the bullet with the first one, he’s gone on to get 30 more, spanning both his scientific and science-fiction interests. Although the decision to wait until his 40s to get a tattoo wasn’t necessarily because of the potential stigma, he does notice that he’s an outlier of sorts.

“My older colleagues, unless they have a Marine Corps anchor on their arm, very few of them have a tattoo,” he says. “All my colleagues who are younger than me have them.”

That said, many of the interviewed scientists did note that despite the growing acceptance, they did consider hideability when getting tattooed.

“If I’m wearing long pants and a long-sleeve shirt, none of my tattoos are visible,” Disotell says. “So I would never do a neck, face or head one — besides just imagining how painful that would be.”

Haynes also notes that although she’s never felt the need to hide her tattoos, getting something that could be covered by long sleeves was a factor in considering tattoo placement.

However, she’s never felt judged for having tattoos, adding that cell biologists are “inherently quirky people” who embrace them.