To be perfectly honest, I’ve grown tired of looking at other people’s tattoos … and yet I can’t avert my gaze completely. Because in spite of my claim of disinterest, I can still recall that waitress in Portland with the dramatic Steel Bridge across her shapely arm and, of course, a lot depends on the canvas, but that’s another story.

So it wasn’t without some mild interest that I picked up this book Science Ink by Carl Zimmer to see just what separates “Tattoos of the Science Obsessed” from the rest of us, whether we have some ink on our bodies or not. It’s a somewhat predictable, yet educational visual and verbal attempt to share what individuals who occupy places in the world of Science, academia or otherwise, want to have inked on their skin. The book is broken up into chapters of scientific fields, so we gather the following: Paleontologists like dinosaurs and fossils as much as Chemistry people can appreciate molecular diagrams of, say, Diazepam. So yes, the book is predictable on that level, but it’s also a clever vehicle to ask just what is an Uffington Horse, or Buckyballs, and who would tattoo Siphonophores on their ankle for that matter?

These individuals are dedicated to their obvious interests and the concept of this book works if you appreciate skin art, the sciences, or some odd combination of both that lead to finding yourself gazing at pages of tattooed science geeks. Fun reading, now if only they’d publish more books about other self-obsessed people who want to tell you their life story via their epidermal canvas. Wait, that didn’t come out right. Anyway, I say check it out!