A consequence of the results of Bers and Griffiths on the uniformization of complex algebraic varieties is that the universal cover of a family of Riemann surfaces, with base and fibers of finite hyperbolic type, is a contractible 2 − 2- dimensional domain that can be realized as the graph of a holomorphic motion of the unit disk. In this paper we determine which holomorphic motions give rise to these uniformizing domains and characterize which among them correspond to arithmetic families (i.e. families defined over number fields). Then we apply these results to characterize the arithmeticity of complex surfaces of general type in terms of the biholomorphism class of the 2 − 2- dimensional domains that arise as universal covers of their Zariski open subsets. For the important class of Kodaira fibrations this criterion implies that arithmeticity can be read from the universal cover. All this is very much in contrast with the corresponding situation in complex dimension one, where the universal cover is always the unit disk.