Some tattoos tell you everything at first glance. An ambigram makes you work for it — and that's exactly the point. You look at it one way, it means one thing.

If you've spent any time scrolling through tattoo inspiration lately, you've probably noticed a word or name that seems to read the same way even when you flip it upside down.

Douglas Hofstadter is probably best known as the author of Gödel, Escher Bach, a classic of popular science writing published in 1979. In 1983, he coined the word “ambigram”, meaning a piece of text ...