For more than 2,000 years, women from the Baiga tribe in the highland district of Dindori, in central India’s Madhya Pradesh state, have been tattooed. Sumintra, 25, from Bona village, has the markings across her forehead, legs and arms. The women who work as tattoo artists are knowledgable about the different types of designs and pigments preferred by various tribes, and their meanings are passed to them by their mothers. The tattooing ‘season’ begins with the approach of winter. (Photo by Ronny Sen/WaterAid/The Guardian)

Most people know Nikon as a purveyor of pro and consumer-grade digital cameras. But the company's expertise with optics bleeds over into related markets – it's one of the science community's major suppliers of microscopes. And each year the company asks the community to send it some of their favorite images of tiny objects. A panel of scientists and journalists have chosen the best of this past year's submissions, which Nikon has placed on its Small World site.

Photo: Honorable Mention. “Snow crystal, illuminated with colored lights (5x)”. (Photo by Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Department of Physics, Pasadena, California, USA)

Keira Knightley attends the premiere for “A Dangerous Method” at The 55th BFI London Film Festival at The Odeon West End on October 24, 2011 in London, United Kingdom. (Photo by Dave Hogan/Getty Images)

Two Bunny Girls from the Playboy Club and two Penthouse Pets from the Penthouse Club prepare to take part in the annual Good Friday waiters and waitresses race in Battersea Festival Gardens, London, 28th March 1972. (Photo by Ian Showell/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Mr. Zhong Hua, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, took this image of the peripheral nerves (those outside of the brain) in an 11.5-day-old mouse embryo, magnified five times. (Photo by Zhong Hua)

A competition, now in its 43rd year, dedicated to showcasing the beautiful and bizarre as seen under a light microscope attracted over 2,000 entries from 88 countries. Here: Honorable Mention by Emre Can Alagöz, Istanbul, Turkey: The eyes of a jumping spider, magnified 6x. (Photo by Emre Can Alagöz/2017 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition)

In this picture made available Thursday July 11, 2013 a zoo-keeper presents three of twelve ferret babies at Eekholt Zoo in Grossenaspe, Germany, Wednesday July 10, 2013. The ferret babies were born May 25, 2013. (Photo by Markus Scholz/AP Photo/Dpa)