What lurks beneath a scientist's lab coat?

'Although I’m not a scientist by trade,' writes Lauren Caldwell, 'my work on 17th- and 18th-century British literature has provided ample opportunity for me to become acquainted with the work of some brilliant scientific innovators' Though we have discarded some of their ideas, their work retains all of its vital visual force' Photograph: Courtesy of Carl Zimmer

Two equations, each sweet and short, run along the arms of Adam Simpson, who works at the US National Centre for Computational Sciences. One appeared in Newton’s Principia Mathematica in 1687. In three letters, it describes how any object moves through the universe, driven by a push, a fall, a spark. The other appeared 218 years later, in a paper by a young patent clerk named Albert Einstein. An object did not just have energy from its movement, Einstein declared, but had energy hidden away in its own mass. 'I got the tattoos because it’s amazing to me how just a few characters can impact the world so much, and I want others to know that,' Simpson says
Photograph: Courtesy of Carl Zimmer

'This tattoo,' says Helen Malenda, 'is a geologic cross section, which was a final project for a structural geology course I had while studying a semester at Humboldt State University [California]. It is a graphical representation of rock types found in a slice of a mountain chain, created from a geographical map of the ground surface' Photograph: Coutesy of Carl Zimmer

Kristin O'Malley sporting a double helix Photograph: Courtesy of Carl Zimmer

'My tattoo is taken from a 1950s biology textbook,' explains Matthew Beer, a Philadelphia political organiser. 'The reason it means so much to me is because of the relevance of the nitrogen cycle to the cycle of life. The horse dies, which feeds the plant, which feeds the horse. It's really quite beautiful' Photograph: Courtesy of Carl Zimmer

Hannah Rosa, a science teacher from London, got a tattoo of the narrow-bordered bee hawk moth. 'I have worked closely with endangered species in the field,” she says. “I wanted to become a lifelong ambassador so that I can educate others about the impact of climate change and other human activities, which are threatening hundreds of species in the UK alone' Photograph: Courtesy of Carl Zimmer

Michael Raasch, a self-styled 'computer scientist and geek', has MichaelRaasch spelled in amino acids encoded in codons of DNA Photograph: Courtesy of Carl Zimmer

The tattoo adorning Paula Zelanko, a chemist at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, represents a machine called an isotope ratio mass spectrometer Photograph: Courtesy of Carl Zimmer

'I'm an evolutionary biologist who investigates the evolution of sperm form, sperm-female interactions and sperm competition. So... yeah, it's pretty much about sperm,' says Scott Pitnick, an associate professor at Syracuse University Photograph: Courtesy of Carl Zimmer

Jacylynn Rosenthal's tattoo represents part of a gene called p53, which is sometimes called the guardian of the genome. Photograph: Courtesy of Carl Zimmer

'From these nine axioms,' writes Turing Eret, a software designer in Colarado, 'one can derive all of mathematics – a field you can likely tell that I love dearly' Photograph: Courtesy of Carl Zimmer

Science Ink by Carl Zimmer Photograph: PR