Science, Skin and Ink – Slide Show @ NYTimes.com.

What began as a question about science tattoos on Carl Zimmer’s blog in 2007 quickly turned into an obsession. “Without intending it, I became a curator of tattoos, a scholar of science ink,” he writes in his new book, “Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.” In addition to presenting Mr. Zimmer’s collection of tattoo photos, of everything from Newton’s second law of motion to Darwin’s finches, the book celebrates the science behind the ink. Here are some of the tattoos that “display a membership with the universe itself” and the words Mr. Zimmer uses to describe them.