Peter has forward me this interesting story about a woman's tattoo experience.

"I have four Japanese symbols across my back, gleaned from a Japanese-English dictionary.

...

Yes, it would seem that in our haste, nobody took the semicolon from the dictionary entry out of the design and it now lives for eternity on my skin."


http://ittybiz.com/moral-of-the-story-topless-edition-with-photos/

Peter and I are shaking our heads regarding:

She is apparently more upset that there's a semicolon attached to her tattoo than by the fact that the tattoo itself is terribly done.

According to the tattoo's owner, Naomi Dunford, "It was supposed to say 'Mother Daughter Sister Wife'. Then wife was a pain in the ass and it was supposed to say 'beauty.' Who the hell knows what it means at this point?"

from: Amilcar C.
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 8:08 AM

Hello,

Congrats for the cool blog.

A colleague has this tattoo done a couple of years ago and she was told it is suppose to mean “strength”.

Does it really mean that or anything else at all?

Thanks,

Amilcar C.



小畜 originated from the book of I Ching, meaning "small accumulating". Other variations include "the taming power of the small" and "small harvest". I don't see the connection between that and "strength", unless there is some kind of six degrees of Kevin Bacon I Ching I didn't know about.

from: Kama
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 12:51 AM
subject: tattoo request

HanziSmatter site is amazing, great idea :) I love reading it. Chinese and Japanese characters looks great, but I still don't understand why people are tattooing their names in those languages, when they come from German, England or Poland, like me.

I guess they want to look cool, like my friend, who is 100% sure that he has "Julia" tattoo on his left hand.

Is he? Please, help me to translate it right (if it's not ok) because he is playing so smart, that would be a pleasure to prove him wrong ;)

Greetings from Poland,

Kama



珠丽娅 is an acceptable phonetic Chinese translation for Julia, however all characters were done mirrored.