If you had to get a tattoo right now, what would it be and why?
A colorful DNA helix around my left forearm.
The image is a reminder that everyone is uniquely coded. Comparing myself to anyone else—or attempting to change anyone else’s code—is futile.
We are all made of the same materials, never entirely separate from the whole, yet there is something miraculously different about every human creation.
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I was born without a tear duct in my right eye.
The first two years of my life were filled with visits to our small-town doctors, who were mostly guessing what to do with a baby and that particular malformation.
They tried to create a duct by drilling up my nasal cavity in hopes of creating a channel of scar tissue between my nose and eye.
It didn’t work.
After two years of attempts, my mother heard my cries during a final visit and decided she couldn’t take it anymore.
She burst into the room, picked me up, and said,
“We’re not doing this to her anymore.”
She went home and researched other doctors and hospitals. Eventually, she took me to a much larger city four hours away, where I had an artificial duct put in through surgery.
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Growing up with an artificial duct was pretty unique.
If I pointed it out, people could see it.
With other kids, I would tell them I was a robot.
I imagined that little eye prosthetic was watching everything I saw, too.
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When I was a teen, the artificial duct started to hurt.
The doctor was surprised I hadn’t had it removed sooner.
He went up my nose, pulled out the duct, and that was that.
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Today, I can still breathe and blow through my eye.
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I also learned today that our DNA has grammar.
DNA has sequences that behave a little like words, rules that determine how those words are read, and tiny changes that can alter the meaning of what gets made.
I like thinking about that.
Somewhere in the first draft of me, something was written differently.
No tear duct.
Maybe it was a mutation.
A typo.
A strange sentence.
Or simply a grammatical possibility my body knew how to write.
Humans tried for years to edit it.
Eventually, they did.
Then, years later, we took the edit back out.
The original life sentence remains.
I still blow air through my eye.
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The future DNA tattoo around my arm may even be considered imperfect, too.
It will be a code.
My reminder. I don’t need to understand every life’s sentence.
I don’t need to rewrite anyone else’s story or attempt to decode them.
And I certainly don’t need to compare my story to a body written in another language.
We are all variations in an ancient genetic grammar.
Still being coded.
Still being read.
Still becoming.
*
Source / Further reading:
“Decoding nature’s grammar with DNA language models,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025. Read the open-access article here.
A 2026 Nature piece specifically describes researchers as uncovering the “hidden grammar” of the regulatory genome. Read the open-access article here.
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