Chris Daub writes:
I don’t know if you are still collecting these, but I wanted to send you a pic of my recent tattoo of a Von Karman vortex street. This is a (reasonably) faithful representation of an image from an actual experiment to produce this phenomenon, from the book An Album of Fluid Motion (hope they don’t sue me!).
I’ve always thought it was a beautiful pattern, and I’m fascinated with how it appears in such diverse contexts in a large range of space and time scales. I work in molecular simulation of fluids, so I don’t quite study Von Karman vortices, but this kind of fluid dynamics is at least tangentially related to my field.
You can see the rest of the Science Tattoo Emporium here or in my book, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.
Originally published August 5, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.