Hi all!
Today's post is hypothetical, as I'm not a tattoo person, but someone very close to me got their first tattoo. The question then came up, that if the Awkward Engineer ever got a tattoo, what kind of tattoo would the Awkward Engineer get?
It's hard enough for me to just pick out clothes to wear and those aren't permanently affixed to my body, let alone a tattoo. Just starting with the clothing problem, I think the challenge is finding clothes that adequately represent how I want to portray myself, and of course, have to be comfortable. Turns out, my favorite article of clothing is a Dickey's work shirt with an iron-on patch of a blue dinosaur. It has buttons and a collar, which I think makes it vaguely more professional than a t-shirt (which, let's be honest, working in tech lately with mostly software engineers, I wear a lot of), but it still gives off hands-on, machine shop vibes, which speaks to my mechanical engineer roots. Plus, it has a blue dinosaur on it, which is just fun, and I've never seen anyone else with a blue dinosaur shirt, which makes it unique. Which sounds like me. Vaguely professional, engineer-y, fun, and unique. And of course, the shirt is comfy and incredibly durable, making it very functional.
A tattoo would probably need to meet similar criteria... engineer-y, fun, unique, and functional. Initial thoughts were that reference tables, equations, or conversion factors, but they didn't seem unique enough.
It was really the functional part, that stood out. I thought for a while and settled on a slide rule. (For those unfamiliar with slide rules, they were a form of analog computer that were made obsolete by cheap digital calculators. They relied on some mathematical properties of logarithms, i.e. log(a * b) = log(a) + log(b), to perform calculations by sliding two logarithmic scales past each other.)
If I could get a logarithmic scale on say, each arm, and then I could slide my arms past each other, I could have a nifty portable slide rule. Functional, nerdy, and unique! Bingo! (Although since starting on the project, someone pointed out to me that Adam Savage, of Mythbuster's fame, has a ruler tattooed on his inner arm, as well as selling identical copies as temporary tattoos, but it is distinctly not a slide rule.)
I tried prototyping by printing a logarithmic scale on paper, then trying to use it like a ruler and transferring the marks to my arm with pen. This turned out to be quite tricky and my arm was too squishy and the scale stretched too much, losing accuracy. (My wife said, "but it's about looks, it doesn't have to functional," to which I replied "NO. IT NEEDS TO WORK," before washing it off to try again.)
I settled on my index fingers, as there was a lot less squish. It was still tricky transferring the marks, and I ended up glue-sticking a paper printout to my finger to copy them over. I'd say it was successful enough to warrant ordering a temporary tattoo from an online service.
Anyway, without further ado... here's me demonstrating how to multiply by 2 with my prototype, color-on-myself-with-pen, finger slide rule.
best regards!
Sam Feller
aka THE Awkward Engineer