"Dave" sent me a photo of his friend's tattoo about two weeks ago with:
A couple of days ago a friend of mine got a tattoo, and upon asking him what it meant, he told me it was a "secret". I know my friend isn't the brightest of stars and I suspect that he had help translating it after he got tattooed and found out it meant "I love sucking ass" or something similar, so I would REALLY love to know what it really means, and since he can barely speak English, let alone Japanese. 
At first I thought
举节际乐 (traditional format:
擧節際樂) was some kind of
idiom. When my own research turned up fruitless, I then forward it to
Alan and he replied with:
What does this jumble supposedly mean? I have no idea. This means nothing in Japanese. Except for perhaps 举 would be recognizable as a variant of 拳.Even looking at the traditional forms, the characters would be recognized but I don't think that any Japanese person would discern any meaning other than the meanings of the individual characters.What is this supposed to be? I wonder if the owner of the tattoo simply picked the characters at random.
The whole thing could be backwards (or actually inverted bottom to top), so it should really be read 乐际节举.
This is all I can guess now, but it is really strange that the tattoo would be written inverted even though the characters themselves appear to be fine. Maybe the tattooist was working from a computer-generated font that was cut apart and re-stacked incorrectly like the case of Kimberly.
I tend to agree with Alan and this could be just another case of gibberish been tattooed on one's body. It has even happened to
CIA's "Kryptos".
