This one is still kind of up in the air. Right now, after the Kandinski tattoo, the main blank space I have is my left forearm. My right and left shoulders are also possibles, along with neck and scalp areas for smaller tattoos. Scalp and neck tattoos are especially intriguing since Steven also designs my hair, so he can certainly come up with interesting ideas for those.
Anyway, pending what Steven designs with the Dali-melting-clocks-time-dilation-equation concept, I thought about something involving Schrodinger’s wave equation. This is the fundamental equation that describes the dynamics of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and what won him the Nobel prize, so it’s a natural for a math-related tattoo.
At the same time, M.C. Escher is a favorite for all mathematicians, including me. In fact, I think he’s the only artist to have a featured showing at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society. In 2003, the Society dedicated an entire issue of the Notices to articles on the mathematics underlying his work. It turns out that there’s a perfect Escher work to pair with Schrodinger’s famous equation, In Waves.
This is a variation on one of Escher’s tesselations, i.e., a repeating pattern of interlocking images that fit together perfectly to tile a flat plane. For this particular woodcut, Escher used a basic tesselation of interlocking fish and added a wave effect.
At left is the tattoo design I came up with based on this woodcut. I don’t know of Steven will be able to make this work or not, but if he can it’ll be awesome. In order to make it fit, I cropped the original a bit to change the aspect ratio and, of course, added colors and the wave equation. The idea was to try to make something proportioned to fit on my left forearm between my watch and my elbow. I suspect–pending Steven’s advice–this will also take more than one session to do.
For the purpose of making stencils, color separations (navy blue and azure) and an outline of the filled areas are below.
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