Bringing nerdy back

One of my Christmas gifts from my wife this year was a voucher for the tattoo shop down the street. She said she really liked wave armband tattoos; I did some quick Google searching and thought they looked cool, so I booked an appointment. I printed out a screen shot of the Google image results for the tattoo artist to use as a guide:

He came up with a design, but I made one last-minute change to it before he printed the stencil transfer. When I got home with my fresh tattoo, my wife’s expression can best be described as, “What the hell is that?”

Here’s the result:

Why the triangle, you may ask – as she did…Well, I thought I’d come up with some story about it being a secret symbol from a fraternity I used to belong to in college or something like that. But everyone including my wife knows I wasn’t cool enough to be in any fraternity, so I had to fess up that it’s just plain nerdy as all get-out. If you’ve already been inducted into the geeky gang of water modellers, you may already know what it is. For everyone else, here is an excerpt from a culvert figure in the HEC-RAS manual:

The triangle distinguishes the water surface elevation from the energy gradient. The lines below it are supposed to represent a reflection of sorts. That makes perfect sense in my own head – at least it used to –  but then I got the same what-the-hell-is-that look from my daughter when she first saw the tattoo; and when I explained about the reflection, she said, “well then shouldn’t it be upside down?”

Hmmm…I guess she got me there. I’ve drawn that symbol a thousand times in my career and frankly, I’ve never questioned why the standard symbol doesn’t have a mirrored reflection like this:

So I’ll pose that question to all you other water nerds out there…though I probably should have waited for the answer before making it a permanent feature on my body 🙂

Some might think I’m nuts for including a work-related symbol at all, but here’s my rationale: I already had an armband tattoo with the initials of my kids. My pursuit of determining water surface elevations is what fed those kids over all these years, though, so maybe a little credit is due! Besides, I’ve probably spent as many man-hours of my life dedicated to water modelling as I have to raising the kids. And today I’m celebrating the 5-year anniversary of my little business, which is all about the high water mark after all, so this is just a little something to mark that milestone.

So there you go – I’ll own it!

But just to rub it in a little bit more, here’s a T-shirt my wife got me as a Christmas present back in 2016; little did she know how well it would fit with the gift voucher five years later!