I finally got my new tattoo yesterday. I’ve been meaning to get this done for the past two years, but being a nomad and being able to get appointments from good tattoo artist is a bit rough. Luckily Marcio Bornholdt at Blut & Eisen in Berlin had an open slot and was up for doing my tattoo on short notice, as I already had all the design files ready to go. There’s a ton here, despite the plain look.
The most obvious thing is the resistor color codes. Doing electronics for a living, that’s kind of easy to see why I would get such a thing done. However, that’s a very small portion of the population that will initially recognize it. Most people tend to see just the rainbow, and that leads to lots of fun questions. I’m openly bisexual, and have done queer geeks panels at both CCC-Camp 2011 and again at 28c3. So I’m fine with the ambiguity, which adds itself into the meaning of the tattoo for me.
While I didn’t really need to have the colors implanted into my skin (already have them memorized), it will be a fun way of teaching others how to read the colors in classes. Also, I had the tattoo made to be five inches long, making each block one half inch. So I can use this tattoo as a reasonable-guess ruler. Being skin, it stretches and deforms, so I’ll have to learn the proper way to hold my arm so that it’s at least moderately accurate.
The next part of the tattoo, is that I programmed it in processing. It’s obviously open source, so do with it what you will. 
Here’s the source code:
int[] colors = {
#000000, #964B00, #DF0101, #FF8000, #FFFF00,
#04B404, #0101DF, #BF00FF, #848484, #FFFFFF
};
float Phi = (1+sqrt(5))/2;
int X = 140;
float Y = X * Phi;
float ratio = X/TWO_PI;
size (int(X*10 + ratio), int(Y + ratio));
strokeWeight(ratio);
for(int i = 0; i <10; i++){
fill(colors[i]);
rect((i*X)+(ratio/2), ratio/2, X, Y);
}
So in summary, it’s a resistor color code chart, it’s a rainbow, it’s a ruler, it’s got both the golden ratio and Tau built in, and it was written in a programming language. So it’s a meaningful tattoo that’s also useful for me beyond looking great.
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