26 nerdtastic tattoos

Click through the following gallery to see how inked geeks wear their passion for video games, cartoons, code, math, and more.

Superman fan Nathan Pflanz of Kansas City, Mo., based his tattoo on "Superman: The Animated Series." This picture was taken about two years ago right after the tattoo was finished (look closely and you might see blood in a few spots, Pflanz notes). "My body actually rejected the dark red ink in Superman's cape he says. "I have no plans to get it fixed."

Paul Curwin's wrist tattoos of a Transformers Autobot and Decepticon represent his own interpretation of yin and yang. Curwin, who lives in Moncton, Canada, also has the Spider-Man spider etched on his chest, but he's not ready to show that one to the Internet just yet.

Click through the following gallery to see how inked geeks wear their passion for video games, cartoons, code, math, and more.

Click through the following gallery to see how inked geeks wear their passion for video games, cartoons, code, math, and more.

More love for Nintendo. Joel Van Goor, who works at The Body Gallery tattoo shop in Sterling, Va., drew this 1-Up Mushroom from Nintendo's Super Mario series on his friend Rachel's arm. It's nestled into the Fire Flower power-up from the same games.

Click through the following gallery to see how inked geeks wear their passion for video games, cartoons, code, math, and more.

"I know it's an old-school game, but Serious Sam is still one of my favorite PC games," says Joel Hampton of St. Louis, who thought the Serious Sam logo would be fitting for his first, and only (so far) tattoo. "It's located in an area that only my wife regularly sees, so it's not intrusive in my professional life," he says. We didn't ask for specifics.

And still more Mario. David Agee of Atlanta has played video games since he was a kid, and the Nintendo NES was his first console. Thus, this 8-bit invincibility star from Super Mario.

John Hammonds, a U.S. Navy cryptologic technician based in Hawaii, sports a tattoo showing ASCII text of his initials, "JTH." Hammonds' brother-in-law Todd Wilson, a tattoo artist in Anderson, S.C., inked the tattoo in 2005.

Samuel Gibson of Tallahassee, Fla., went with Nintendo light guns, adding an OG for "original gamer."

Click through the following gallery to see how inked geeks wear their passion for video games, cartoons, code, math, and more.

Click through the following gallery to see how inked geeks wear their passion for video games, cartoons, code, math, and more.

The tattoo on the inside of Cynthia Taylor's right arm celebrates her love of computer programming. The UC San Diego computer science grad student proudly wears markings from Scheme, one of the first programming languages she learned.

Thomas Cameron of Austin, Texas, wears his Linux and open-source advocacy ("yeah, I'm a fanboy to be sure, no apologies," he says) on his sleeve. The Red Hat employee boasts the Red Hat Shadowman, to honor the community, atop an armband comprised of a printed circuit board, to honor his general geekiness and his relationship with Red Hat. But that's not Cameron's only geeky ink...

Alan Ottley, a physicist from Salt Lake City, wears a tattoo-in-progress showing the Fibonacci series of numbers and the Greek letter phi, which represents the sequence.

U.K. resident Claiton Lovato's tattoo shows a passion for biology, but also "that I definitely have binary code on my DNA."

Chris Cooksey of Irvine, Calif., got his Star Wars Rebel Alliance insignia tattoo when he was 18 and in his first semester of college. "Symbolic to say the least," he says.

Can you tell Scott Sackett's a World of Warcraft fan? That's a helmet of the Lich King on his leg. But that's not his only WoW tattoo...

Sackett, who lives in Spring, Texas, also wears an image of a lion from a Warcraft stein he bought in the real world.

Isaac Miller of Battlefield, Mo., grew up with Harry Potter. His tattoo of the Dark Mark symbol is a testament to his Harry Potter-loving childhood, he says.

Casey Tamblyn of Portland, Ore., wears He-Man's sword from the 1980s cartoon "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" on his right thigh. "It was a show I grew up watching and always loved, plus I'm into swords quite a bit, so it just fit," he says.

Brigham Stevens of Seattle calls his left forearm his "Sinistarm" due to the tattoo of the main character from the 1982 coin-op arcade game Sinistar. The goal of the game is to prevent drone/mining ships from assembling Sinistar out of crystals found in asteroids.

Cameron also sports a Fedora logo on his back.

Greg Ramsdell of Buffalo, N.Y., shows his allegiance to the Gallactic Empire with this tattoo on his upper left arm. As you may be able to tell, it's still fresh in this picture.

While a college student in Bowling Green, Ohio, a few years back, Dave Miller got an ultraviolet-ink tattoo that glows under a blacklight, but can't be seen otherwise. The tattoo depicts the "Invisible Pink Unicorn," the goddess of a parody religion used to satirize theistic beliefs.

"It's an invisible tattoo of an invisible unicorn," Miller notes. The tattoo looks red in the bottom left photo because it hasn't yet fully healed.