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99% Invisible

Atomic Tattoos

99% Invisible

SiriusXM Podcasts and Roman Mars

Design, Arts

4.827.5K Ratings

🗓️ 16 January 2019

⏱️ 35 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Atomic tattoos and concept of survivability. The idea that with enough canned food, shelters, fearlessness (and maybe tattoos) the American people would be able to survive an atomic attack.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is 99% invisible.

0:02.0

I'm Roman Mars.

0:05.0

Producer Liza Yeager recently did something that will become pretty common with the next generation of kids.

0:11.0

She asked her grandma to show her her tattoo.

0:14.0

Can you just describe what the tattoo looks like?

0:18.0

That's Liza.

0:19.0

Oh, the tattoo.

0:20.0

And that's my grandma, Carol Fishler, showing me her tattoo.

0:23.3

It's very tiny.

0:24.8

I think it's maybe five eighths of an inch

0:27.9

and it looks like a little hand mirror.

0:30.6

Although it's definitely not a hand mirror.

0:33.0

It's a little circle and then a line going off to the side of it

0:38.0

and then there's a cross over that line because my blood type is O-plus.

0:43.0

It's a tiny tattoo of her blood type,

0:46.0

right on her ribcage and just under her left arm.

0:49.0

Okay, so do you think that you can just walk me through step by step

0:52.0

the whole process of getting the tattoo?

0:55.1

Oh, well, um, it was pretty straightforward.

1:01.8

All of the kids whose parents had signed the

1:05.1

little slip were taken marched out of our classroom and down the hall and yeah this was

1:12.2

in school this happened in Lake County, Indiana. It was 1952 and my grandma was 16.

...

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