Take a look at your hands, your fingertips, and your fingerprints. Why do I have these? What do they do? Am I really unique? Let’s see where looking at fingerprints has led people. Enjoy the journey!

“The artists we love, they put their fingerprint on your imagination, and on your heart and your soul.”

 ~ Bruce Springsteen

“I believe that each young person is different from any other who has ever lived, as different as his fingerprints: that he could bring to the world a wonderful and special way of solving unsolved problems, that in his special way, he can be great.”

 ~ Edwin Land

Watch This: Why are your fingerprints unique?

Each of the links below will lead you through the questions that you pondered above.

• What is the mystery behind our unique fingerprints? and What are fingerprints?
• Where do Fingerprints come from?
• How do my fingerprints form?
• How Fingerprinting works

Follow this link to complete an activity on fingerprinting.

•  Fingerprint Lab

Use a water-based marker on your fingerprints and apply it to a white piece of paper. 

• What patterns do you have?
• How does your left hand fingerprints compare to the right hand?
• How do your percent of fingerprint types compare with the statistics in the lab? Or with your family?

What further questions do you have?

• Identity is More than Fingerprints 
• Writing a Bio Poem

Modern Crime Solving

• Your fingerprints reveal more than you think- Simona Francese

Explore more:

• Identity and Poetry

• Family heredity and fingerprints

Let your artistic side show. Go back to your identity word list and pick three of your favorite words to describe yourself.

• Make an art project around these three words to put up in your room to see each day