Caffeine molecule tattoo on a forearm in black linework with grey shading and small red oxygen atoms, with a star tattoo partly visible below.

Caffeine molecule on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A chemical structure diagram of caffeine is tattooed on the inner forearm, drawn in black lines with the atom labels CH3 and the ring bonds clearly outlined. Grey and blue-grey shading sits on the ring atoms, and two red circles mark the oxygen atoms. A partial star tattoo with lettering is visible at the bottom edge of the frame against a plain background.

Forearm Molecule Chemical structure Star Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dilys Moreau had been told by her first head of department that a molecule was not a metaphor, and for thirty-one years she had believed him. At twenty past six on a wet Thursday in March, the fume cupboard hummed over bench four, the kettle in the corridor clicked off unheeded, and she was drawing caffeine for the third time because the second drawing had a methyl group hanging off the wrong nitrogen. The ring was the easy part. Six corners, two of them carrying red oxygens like tiny bells, and the nitrogens sitting in the five-sided half like lodgers who had never agreed on the rent.

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Her grandson had rung that afternoon to ask why the lines bent. She told him carbon likes to hold four bonds at angles that suit it, and that the oxygens pull electrons towards themselves the way a cat claims the warm chair. He wanted to know whether it woke you up. She said only if you took enough, and that the trick was an old one: the molecule fits a lock in the brain that was built for something else, so the brain hears the wrong message and keeps answering it. He said that sounded like his mother. She told him to mind his manners.

By seven the corridor lights had gone to their night setting and the cleaner's trolley squeaked past the door without stopping. Dilys took the graph paper, pinned it to the board beside the old crystallography photographs, and stood back with her cold tea. The drawing was not beautiful. The methyls were slightly crooked and one bond ran a shade long. But every atom sat where the literature said it should, and for once the thing on paper behaved like the thing in the flask. She switched off the hood, left the light on for the cleaner, and went home counting bonds.