1. Home
  2. Tattoos
  3. Ruler

Ruler

Inspired by Adam Savage’s ruler tattoo — a highly practical 6-inch ruler on his left forearm with precise markings for both inches and centimeters — I set out to design my own version. I wanted something more minimalistic, focused purely on measurement. Baselines and the straight edge of a ruler serve drawing as much as measuring, and that function doesn’t translate well to skin. I also preferred fewer subdivisions: tattoo lines have physical limits, and there’s an intentional contrast between the organic, imprecise nature of skin and the rigidity of an engineering tool. The designs below trace that progression from a full traditional ruler to a minimal set of tick marks. I settled on metric (cm / 5mm marks) on the left and imperial (1″ / ½″ / ¼″ marks) on the right. I also used Claude Code to quickly visualize different variations — it made iterating on the designs remarkably fast.

Design Revisions

plain

Baselines, no numbers.

ruler

Full ruler with baselines and numbers. Cm labels 0–10 on the left, inch labels 0–4 on the right.

plain2

Tick marks only — no baselines, no numbers.

ruler2

Numbers only — no baselines. Tick marks edge-aligned on each side.

ruler3

Like ruler2.png but cm labels show even numbers only: 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10.

simple

No baselines, no numbers. Subdivision ticks center-aligned on the major (1cm / 1″) ticks.

final

Like simple but major ticks in red, narrowed to 240px (tick lengths unchanged).

Page Creation

The ruler designs were created with Claude Code using Python / Pillow. These were the most significant prompts in chronological order:

  1. Create a PNG ruler at 254 DPI, 25mm wide × 4 inches tall, with 1cm marks on the left every 1cm, origin at the bottom
  2. Add 5mm subdivision marks (50px long) every 5mm
  3. Shorten the 1cm marks to 75px
  4. Add 1″ marks on the right side (75px), with a vertical baseline; make image 1px taller to show the 4″ mark
  5. Add ½″ marks (50px) and ¼″ marks (25px) on the right
  6. Draw the 0 line across the full width
  7. Add cm numbers 1–10 on the left (right-aligned to “10”) and inch numbers 1–4 on the right
  8. Align single-digit inch numbers the same distance from their ticks as the cm numbers
  9. Widen image to 3cm (300px) — naturally shifts the inch side 50px right
  10. Create plain.png without numbers by saving before the text step
  11. Remove the bottom baseline; add “0” to both tick sets with bottom padding so it isn’t clipped
  12. Create ruler2 / plain2 variants without baselines; refactor into a make() function with flags
  13. Create ruler3.png with even cm labels only (0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10)
  14. Create simple.png: no numbers, subdivision ticks center-aligned on the major ticks
  15. Make all lines 2px wide; resize major ticks to 80px, keep mid at 50px, shrink ¼″ to 20px
  16. Create final.png: like simple but major ticks in red, narrowed to 240px (tick lengths unchanged)