Barcode Tattoos

Barcode tattoos aren't uncommon any more. UPC barcodes are the most common bar code tattoo subjects and barcode tats are often found on the back of people's necks. While I've been writing barcode software for 18 years and love 'em to death, I ain't got no barcode ink.

Thanks go out to the dozens of people who have shared their photos with me, allowing me to post them here.

The response has been truly overwhelming. If you have a picture of your barcode tattoo, please send it to me: jetcityorange at gmail dot com. Credit and/or links back to you.

I'v written a white paper, "Barcodes: once jargon, now slang" (PDF). In it I talk about barcodes as visual vocabulary.

You may check-out a gallery of tattoos if you would like to have one on your body.

If you're going to get a barcode tattoo, at least do it right. Pat Fish of LuckyFish.com offers this advice: The single most important consideration with a barcode tattoo is scale. There is a blur factor in all tattoos, and thin areas of skin between black carbon pigment lines will inevitably be blurred by the natural skin-cell division causing ink particle movement. The best thing you can be telling people is to have their artist do a bead line of white ink between every black line, and continue to do that on a regular basis every few years so that the white pigment "holds the place open" and prevents the black ink from moving.