I love awful tattoos!
My sister has a kanji tattoo as well but I’m too afraid to check if it really means what she thinks it means.
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I remember when I was 15 there was some guy menacing me and threatening to beat me up. I told him “You know, you might be able to beat me up. I’m not very tough. But I’m not the one who is going to go through the rest of his life with HARLEY DAVISSON misspelled on his arm.”
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Being someone as famous as she is you’d think she’d make to ask someone who actually knew Japanese fluently. Likely they just googled the words separately, which a quick Google search finds that is a very common pitfall for shitty wannabe tattoos.
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According to the article she thought she could shorten it. The phrase is spelled correctly in the music video. Her argument is that she couldn’t sit for one more character let alone the three it would have taken to spell it correctly. Which I kind of understand, but then maybe don’t get it tattooed on your palm?
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ALWAYS get a native speaker or someone who can fluently read/speak the 2nd language text you have if you are getting a tattoo or using it in a professional/semi professional manner.
I do have a Kanji artist “stamp” I have used for a freelance mascot before. But I had someone I met at Disney world who became a face book friend review it for me. She also confirmed that my Megatron Shirt says “transformers” and not something stupid.
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I can smell that here.
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Yeah, Kanji is very particular and small changes can totally change the meaning so if she couldn’t sit for the full thing then just don’t do it or wait until another time to finish. Its ok to take one’s time, it’s not like a half finished tattoo is going to go bad or something.
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Very true – I would say that at least one in five tats using Chinese or Japanese is not what the person who got the tat intended. And it gets worse – many Kanji are based on older Chinese characters – so it may read completely differently depending on if you are reading it as Chinese or Japanese. It might mean something different in Taiwan, or Hong Kong or Singapore because of local usage.
A long time ago when I lived in Hong Kong I overheard some elderly Japanese tourists saying, “wow, that’s a BIG wine shop!” In Hong Kong the two characters 酒店 (wine+shop) means a hotel.
Don’t trust what the people giving you the tat to tell you the truth about what the designs in their books mean. A few years ago I had the misfortune of talking to a biker dude at a bar in Phnom Penh who was angrily telling me that “Obama is the worst thing that ever happened to America” with a tat with the characters 白左 (white+left). I asked him about it and he said it meant “white power”. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it is an insulting label for western social justice warriors and sanctimonious liberals. I don’t think he would have believed me if I did or taken it well if he did.
Another time I met a Bank CEO at a posh cocktail party in the Midlevels (the posh area on HK island on the side of the hill below the Peak). It’s common to see such guys with expensively custom tailored suits and shirts with their initials monogrammed on the cuffs of their shirts. This guy had the characters 炒飯 embroidered on his cuffs. He saw me smirk when I saw them and he smiled broadly and explained that he couldn’t speak cantonese but when he went to a chinese restaurant he always ordered the same thing. So he had his tailor embroider 炒飯 (fried rice) on his cuffs so when he went to order food he just pointed to his shirt! So not all 鬼佬 (a racial slur for white or light skinned foriengers) are complete idiots.
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Not much one can do about that though. I’ve seen some Chinese names that translated very unfortunately into Japanese.
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I guess, it’s the age of believing your own bullshit because you’ve worked hard building your personal facade, oops “brand”.
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I honestly don’t understand the perspective of people who get phrases tattooed on them in languages they aren’t familiar with, aren’t literate in, and don’t have a special relationship with. Why not use your dominant language? If you don’t want something just written on you then why not translate those thoughts into a visual image that isn’t anyone’s written language? Or make your own sigil… it’s untranslatable. Then it will have a meaning that has to be explained and no one will giggle at your permanent order of fried chicken.
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When I search 七輪 on Google I get an entirely different set of results.
I do get some pictures of grills, but I also get a bunch of pages that (according to Google Translate) are about the seven chakras.
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People want the association that they believe they get from the source.
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So less “Kanji” than “Habachi.”
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Its her body…she can ink whatever she wants on it and provide whatever meaning she wants.
I dunno…but poking fun at people for getting bad tattoos seems a bit low on the totem pole. Slow news day Rob?
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Rudy G would agree with you 100%.
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Uhhh… White Power is not offensive in the way you describe, it’s inherently a racist phrase.
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