There’s something fantastically wrong about taking the ephemeral world of technology and etching it into your skin. But that doesn’t stop hundreds of supergeeks from getting supergeek tattoos.

When Doug Hardman got a rainbow-coloured Apple logo in 1996, it was unusual enough to merit a story in Wired magazine. That was before the iMac and the iPod spawned legions of Apple obsessives. Today, Apple tattoos are ubiquitous in geek circles. Microsoft tattoos do exist but they’re very rare.

Just slightly less common than Apple logos are characters from the golden era of video games – Pac-Man ghosts, Space Invaders and Super Mario (and another Mario ). It’s pure nostalgia, as the TV children of the 1980s and 1990s left home, got drunk and got ink. The geek (or Emo kid) equivalent of the little blue dolphin or the tiny rose, is <3 , which means “Less than three” and looks a bit like a heart turned on its side. Bless.

Once you’ve got your geek tat, you can show it off by uploading it to Body Modification Ezine [Warning - these pages have some fresh tattoos with a little bit of blood. Other parts of the site are VERY gruesome and adult only]. Popular tats include: long strings of binary numbers , bar codes , chunks of programming code, molecular structures (mainly serotonin or caffeine) and huge pi symbols. Whatever you’re thinking, someone else has been there first. The geekiest tattoo there? “Subatomic particles in a bubble chamber .”

In 2002, Austrian artist Nikolaus Passath built a tattoo robot. It attaches to your arm, using clothes pegs. Draw an image on the screen and the machine will etch it into your arm. Regrettably, the technology hasn’t spread. Imagine the money you could make installing instant tattoo machines in pubs and bars.

Send your trends to microtrends@thetimes.co.uk