Black line tattoo of the serotonin molecule on the upper chest, with HO, NH2 and NH labels and a blue-toned NH2 group.

Serotonin molecule on chest

Chest · Mixed · Photo

A skeletal chemical diagram of the serotonin molecule is tattooed on the upper chest, made of a fused ring structure with a side chain ending in an NH2 group. The bold black outlines use uniform, even linework, with double bonds shown as inner parallel lines. The HO, NH and NH2 labels are in block lettering, and the NH2 label appears in a lighter blue-toned ink against bare skin.

Chest Molecule Chemical structure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bench lamp had been humming for six hours when Ines finally admitted the ring would not close. Forty-one attempts sat in the logbook under her thumb, each one a little less hopeful than the last, and the sealed crate by the airlock still held the last clean sample the Halden Reach had carried out of the old reactor bay. Nobody on the Meridian had made anything from scratch since the second generation. We had kitchens of cultured protein and bins of salvaged resin, and that was all our hands had been trained for.

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Her grandmother had drawn the thing on the inside cover of the flight manual, two hexagons fused along one edge with a tail reaching off toward the upper corner. 'Hold the shape,' she used to say, 'and the rest will follow.' Ines had taken it for a riddle. To her the ring was a room with a door at one corner, the tail was a corridor running out to the nursery decks, and the small NH2 at its end was the handle you pulled to open it. Her nephew Ren said that was nonsense. Ren was twelve and wanted to fly the shuttles.

She built the ring a seventh time with the lamp dimmed and her breathing slowed, pressing each bond shut like a hatch seal. The sample caught at the tail and burned a cold blue, the colour of the light over the nursery window, and for a moment the whole bench smelled of rain on hot metal. Ren came in with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, looked at the flask, and asked whether it would help him sleep.

She did not tell him it would. She wrote the formula in the logbook instead, label by label, and underlined the last letter twice, so that whoever opened the book after the ship's long dark would know exactly where to begin.