"Family"

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"Forever Protector of Old Ladies"

http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A50925/high/bmegl139061.jpg
http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A50925/high/bmegl139053.jpg

Perhaps the character in the red circle is a Japanese phonetic translation, but there is no character in Chinese vocabulary has 夕 and 女 combined together. When they are separated, the character on the left 夕 has multiple meanings depends on the context. It usually means “dusk” or “evening”. The character on the right 女 means “female”.

In Chinese, it could either mean “evening woman” (prostitute? call girl? escort?) or “old woman” (dying woman?), since people always associate sunset and dusk with old age.

The top two characters on his back are 保 (to protect, to guard) and 永 (eternal). Therefore his tattoo would mean “[to] forever protect evening/old/dying woman” in Chinese.

It would be great if he actually works as a call girl’s body guard or in a nursing home taking care of dying old ladies.

Here is another screw up by the same tattoo studio. 地獄 (hell) is missing a dot. Rock on, you moron.


http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A50925/high/bmegl139050.jpg


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"Mommy"

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"Destroy"

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"Derek"

德里克 is the Chinese phonetic translation of "Derek" and its variants "Dereck" or "Derrick". Too bad the middle character is upside down.

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Bad Fortune

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"Not to Forget"

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"Life" Mirrored

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"Exotic Atmosphere"

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Follow Up: Does This Say "Love"?

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First Female Extremely Hand?

tattoo_shounujishou2.jpg

First of all, this tattooed phrase is complete gibberish. It does not have any significant meaning in neither Chinese nor Japanese. They are four randomly chosen characters. The first character does not even exist in neither Chinese nor Japanese vocabulary; it was made to mimic the Chinese characters.

Plus, the calligraphy is absolutely terrible. The brush strokes' widths are inconsistent, which shows neither the tattooist nor the client had any idea about what proper Chinese or Japanese calligraphy should look like.


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Blood Sweat Tear

http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A50913/high/bmegl132714.jpg

It seems every time my buddy Shannon Larratt updates the BME's Kanji tattoo gallery, there are always some fools showing off their poorly done tats. Sometimes the same mistake on one tattoo reappears on someone else, as if it is some kind of infectious disease.

This guy wanted "blood sweat tear" on his arm. I am curious if the extra red dot in 汗 (sweat) was intentionally placed there for dramatic effect or tattooist's carelessness. The last character 淚 (tear) is missing two strokes, one in right upper corner and one in the right lower corner.


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"tank"

http://photobucket.com/albums/y198/tank666/?action=view&current=Picture001.jpg

Many Asian countries use squatting type toilets, where the user squat over a water trench and water would wash the bio-mass down into the septic tank. These types of toilets in China are called 糞槽 (feces trench) or 尿槽 (urine trench).

The character 槽 may also mean “tank”, “trough”, and “groove” depends on context.

I had a good laugh when a reader emailed in his friend’s tattoo (see above) and said his friend wanted “tank” (military type, not the toilet kind) on him because he liked military tanks and he is a big guy.

By the way, “tank” (military type) in Chinese is 坦克 or 戰車, and 戦車 in Japanese.

Tiger, According to the Flash Book

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeyplaid/34018004/

The character shown in the photo is far from 虎 (tiger). Since it was shown in the tattoo template book, then it must be correct, rignt?

Wrong.

Another one bites the dust, I mean needle.

Tattooed Twits

www.stuffmagazine.com

Thanks to everyone for emailing me about Hanzi Smatter been featured in October 2005 issue of STUFF Magazine.

-Tian

tiangotlost at gmail dot com

http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A50905/high/bmegl123947.jpg

The English word “screw” bears many meanings include “a rod-shaped piece with a spiral groove and a slotted or recessed head designed to be inserted into material by rotating (as with a screwdriver ) and used for fastening pieces of solid material together”, and in vulgar slang, “an act of sexual intercourse”.

The slang term “screw this” usually has meaning equivalent to “forget about it”. Unfortunately English slang often does not direct translate very well contextually into Chinese or Japanese.

This young man probably wanted to express his angst of “screw this” in Chinese (螺絲釘這), yet did not have the patience to verify if the contextual translation was correct or not. His tattoo literally means “insert screw-nail here”, which is something that comes with furniture assembly instruction.

Or he could be a loyal employee of IKEA corporation.

tattoo_baojimenglonggongxionghuanfulei2.jpg

Anyone who has ever stepped into a Chinese restaurant would know there are twelve Chinese zodiac. Apparently in the world this guy is living in, there are only nine. One of the zodiac has then replaced with “leopard” (豹) and the rest are random mirrored characters mixed with Chinese and Japanese. Of course, he did not believe his friends when they pointed them out to him, until now...

Un-healthy

http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A50905/high/bmegl127259.jpg

I don't know whether it was the client or tattooist's idea to give 康 a little "artistic flare". After all, who wants just a plain boring "healthy" to be tattooed in English? Unfortunately, they have done a pretty bad job and the tattooed character is missing several strokes.

"Respect"

http://www.art.com/asp/sp-asp/_/PD--10288287/Kanji.htm?sOrig=SCH&ui=1EE7518CC6DA4451BD4B293EDF22FE3E#

This "Respect" poster is for sale at various online stores. Both characters are poorly written. The top character 尊 is missing a horizontal stroke in the 酋 partial, and both top two strokes are suppose to be stand alone. The bottom character 敬 is missing its 口 partial.

Fake Zodiacs

http://nch46.eden2.netclusive.de/lj/023.jpg

Several years ago, this young man went to a tattoo shop in Germany and wanted zodiacs of his mother, sister and himself in Chinese characters to be tattooed on his back. He was very proud of it.

One friend of his has always thought the tattooed characters are fake and then sent a photo of it to a multi-lingual translation service. The translators could not figure out what exactly are those characters. Eventually, they have concluded the characters are gibberish that only mimicked Chinese and Japanese style of characters.

When I first saw this photo, the characters looked similar to some Chinese characters, but none of them are for zodiac.