Geek ink

So the other day I’m walking down the street behind a girl in a sundress and gigantic sunglasses (ironically, it wasn’t a particularly sunny day), when I happen to look down at her feet and notice she has an unusual tattoo across the back of her left ankle. It’s very small, but as I’m about to pass her I finally realize that it’s the quadratic formula, tattooed right across her Achilles tendon. Which was a bit of a shock. I mean, lame Celtic scrollwork, flames, barbed wire strands, Chinese characters and various other designs are pretty standard for people to permanently etch on their skin these days, but the quadratic equation?

Being the geek that I am, I admit it posed a bit of a quandary; I mean, that’s a dedication to geekiness that I can admire, but, at the same time, the quadratic equation is sort of, well, middle-schoolish, don’t you think? Let’s just say I would have been more impressed if it had been the Gauss-Bonnet Formula or the Riemann Zeta Function or something.