Black ink tattoo of a chemical structure with NH, NH2, HO and OH labels, shown on an arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chemical structure tattoo on skin

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo showing a fused-ring chemical structure drawn in black ink, with labels reading NH, NH2, HO and OH. The lines are uniform and clean, with no shading, and the bonds form a simple skeletal diagram. The tattoo is shown on a patch of skin in a tight crop with soft, warm lighting.

Other Chemical structure Molecule

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Orrin Vell kept the galley of the brig Marrowgate for thirty winters and never once learned his letters. What he had instead was a pantry of sealed crocks and a memory for shapes. When the new surgeon, a thin man called Pell, drew his figures on the scullery slate, Orrin studied them the way he studied a cut of salt pork, turning them over until they gave up their weight.

Keep reading

'Six rings,' Pell said, tapping. 'Two hooks of nitrogen, a sprig of oxygen on the far side. This is what keeps a man sound.' Orrin nodded, though the lines looked to him like a fence with a gate left open. He wiped the slate and drew it himself in soot on the inside of the bread door, the bonds running straight and the corners sharp as gutted fish. Each morning he touched the ring where the nitrogen sat before he lit the stove.

In the third week of the grey, the crew took a fever that came up from the hold. Pell was drunk by then, or grieving, and the boy who carried his bag had gone over the side. Orrin measured by the shape of the crocks rather than by weight, following the drawing as best he could, and sat up all night feeding the broth with a spoon he had scoured twice.

By morning the fever had broken. The men called it the cook's miracle and Orrin let them. When the brig docked he scrubbed the rest of the galley bare, but the soot lines stayed on the door, pressed into the grain like something that would not be scrubbed out. Nobody asked him what they meant. He never told them the drawing was only a map of how things hold together.