That is actually the same thing.
I knew a guy who had “bad to the bone” written on his neck in Chinese. The problem is, the phrase doesn’t translate at all.
So, his tattoo read as “my bones are bad”
Tbf, he was a clown and had something like that coming.
Not his fault, that’s just a mean or ignorant tatooist. Why wouldn’t they just do a literal word for word translation if there’s no equivalent phrase in Chinese?
Like if the phrase “great to the neck” has some special meaning in Chinese but not English, you can still write the english words “great to the neck” on someone’s skin.
Unfortunately, I can’t read the language it was written in and I can only go with the people we knew and met who could.
Now the day I was born The nurses all gathered 'round And they gazed in wide wonder At the horror they had found The head nurse spoke up Said, “Leave this one for dead” She could tell right away That my bones were bad
My bones are bad My bones are bad B-B-B-B-Bad B-B-B-B-Bad B-B-B-B-Bad
My bones are bad
Newlines only work properly if the previous line ends in two spaces btw (or if there are two newlines)
When Mr. Glass decided to get a music career.
Mine is similar. On my forearm,not my neck (yuck). It’s supposed to be “blood and guts”. Literal translation equals something about “inside organs”.
I’m okay with that. If you actually discuss the meaning of it works out fine.
I got that tattoo because I actually work with “blood and guts” as a Paramedic.
I guess you also sometimes with with inside organs
Unfortunately, true.
In high school there was a Chinese girl who hung out with us. We were at at an arcade after school one day, and this guy comes up to her. She’s 16. He’s 40. He says something like “Hey baby, check this out!”
He takes off his shirt to reveal a not at all impressive body. But his chest had something tattood on it in Chinese.
She goes wide eyed, and runs off. When we caught up to her (obviously without the guy) she’s having trouble breathing, because she’s giggling so hard. Just try to visualize that. It’s not a belly laugh, it’s a giggle, but she’s giggling so hard she’s wheezing.
Now she spoke full perfect english, and only had a slight barely noticable accient. But when we asked her what was so funny, she went full stereotype Chinese voice from how amused she was at the tattoo.
“His chest…it say ASSHOOOOEEEE!!!” (She was saying asshole, but I typed it phonetically how she said it, and with the enthusiasm she said it).
She just burried her face in her hands, and had the biggest giggle fit I’ve ever seen. She later said “He must have been an asshole to the tattoo artist. He’ll never know!”
I mean considering the fact that he flashed himself to a 16 year old girl without any warning, I’d say that tattoo was well deserved.
宫保鸡丁
kung pao chicken.
he thought it was super funny, like he was in on the joke.
I dunno, I have some workout trousers with a Chinese logogram on them. Dunno what it means. Hope I won’t ever
Same picture
I want “pretty nice and vanilla guy” tattooed on me, and I’ll say it means “horrible pervert”
Don’t leave out the part about your omniscience
I bestow upon you the title of 凡人 (bonjin), in Japanese means an unremarkably mediocre person. You can tattoo it and tell people it means psychopath instead of course, who’s stopping you?
remarkably mediocre. give them an iq test and they’d get exactly 100
Well that’s fairly interesting
remarkably so
Asian beauty makes me think of an ad for makeup. Alternatively, those cool looking mountains from old looking paintings that look like giant ant mounds.
I know someone who has something tattooed on him: in Thai.
As in, it’s a phrase which says ‘in Thai’ in Thai. So when people ask him, what is that? He says ‘it’s in Thai’. They say yes, but what is it? ‘It’s ‘in Thai’’. Yes, but…
You get the idea.
Trolling level expert 😂
I have a tattoo that means “I don’t know, I don’t speak japanese.” It works when an English speaker asks me what it means, and it also worked with the Japanese when I lived in Japan and didn’t speak the language.
That’s the kind of stupid I like.
My sister’s first year in college she got the Chinese word for LOVE tattooed. Later she found out it was the correct symbol, only mirrored. I called her EVOL for a while
Who’s on first?
This is like setting your guest WiFi password to “It’s on the wall over there.”
I knew a barista that set the wifi pass to “ten bucks”.
Some guy came up to me when I first joined the military and told me “hey I got your name tattooed on my ass. Don’t believe me?”
Sure enough there was “YOUR NAME” tattooed on his ass check. I’m pretty sure he just liked showing people his ass.
Was it a nice ass at least?
It has to be if your name is on it
Sometimes, you put your name on the best ass you can get even if it’s not the best ass to put your name on.
Because your name is such dogshit that it makes everything around it nicer by comparison
It wasn’t plump, like how I prefer but I could see why some people would think his ass was nice. Being fit and young and all that.
Is your friend Steve-O?
I’m thinking that’s a combination of a lost bet and some cleverness.
Either it’s just a thing round here or that person is my childhood friend’s cousin. Their grandma wasn’t happy about getting got
Tattooing yourself for the bit is next-level.
A buddy of mine got “OUCH” on the inside of his lip. Ironically, it hurt a lot less than the piece on his shin.
变态外人
biàntài wàirénThanks! Didn’t recognize simplified character behind traditional at first
It would indeed be the case if it were Chinese.
However it seems it’s written in Japanese and follows the Japanese 新字体・舊字體 standard instead of the Chinese 简体字・繁體字
変態外人-Japanese Shinjitai
變態外人-Chinese Traditional
变态外人-Chinese Simplified
Thanks! That explains a lot
I remember seeing a FB post ages ago, of some dude saying that he went to Japan to tattoo “God is faithful” in Japanese because he didn’t trust local tattooists to write it right. The post was a photo of the tattoo on the dude’s arm.
Someone pointed that it said something along the lines of “idiot stranger”.
Mr “I went to Japan” complained that was impossible, because he went to Japan.
The other person posted a screenshot of the kanji on google translate and lo, “idiot stranger”
As someone who went to Japan, yeah I’d expect that shit there more than in America honestly
Even the premise: why would you want a Christian message in Japanese?
deleted by creator
Apparently Christianity is about 1.5% of the population, which is almost 2 million people. In some areas you can see signs on sheds talking about Jesus or life after death, etc. A friend of mine knew a local older lady who had one on her shed and asked her if she put it there and said that it just appeared one morning. She wasn’t Christian but thought a sign talking about god was kind of nice so she just left it up.
Guess if the local sect can’t convince people to hang signs they’re willing to do some guerrilla jesus-ing. This one says “Jesus is the son of god.”
I expected even more Christians in Japan but there is a difference between Christians in Japan who adopt Christian messages into the Japanese language and a Westerner (I assume) going to Japan to get a tattoo. If I want a Christian message tattooed, I would want it in a language I understand or maybe one that is significant for Christian culture like Latin or Old Greek or maybe Hebrew. But why in Japanese?
Jesus is the son of god
I always hated this sentiment. I don’t think sons should automatically inherit their fathers’ sins. Jesus seemed to be a mostly cool dude, albeit with his own human flaws (including the common blindness to his father’s abusive nature) and it really doesn’t seem fair to lump him in with his dad.
Didn’t you know the man on the cross was Jesus’s secret brother who was martyred in His name while Jesus fled to Japan, started a family, and died of old age?
They were a big fan of Silence.
Some guesses: it looks cool, it makes people curious to ask “what’s that supposed to mean?”, the dude was a christian otaku
I was once at a convenience store, run by a Chinese man, and this 30ish girl in a tank top, obviously a regular comes in and says @look I got my sons name tattooed. Then she says, “look, Aitor@“. The guysmiles nervously. She leaves, and I ask the guy, who es shaking his head, and he says that it was some random mataré sign.
I was in line behind someone who had 安 on her nape. I’m guessing she was going for a meaning of like peaceful or restful or something along those lines but you need a compound like 安心 or 安静 for that.
The character alone means more like cheap, at least in Japanese. Maybe it’s different in Chinese.
In Chinese, 安 by itself can mean secure. I think.
edit: it can also be a surname. but still seems a bit strange to me to have that character by itself.
Yep, Chinese like to use single character to mean something, but the word generally have positive meaning so it’s used in name as well. Though i’m not sure if it’s surname, never heard anyone with that name, given name though yeah.
I’ve met someone with that surname. Although it definitely isn’t a very common one.
Not the first time I’ve Lemmied this story, and it’s not a tattoo it’s a motorcycle decal. Kid turns up on a Kawasaki forum to show off his Ninja’s paint scheme, and on the front cowling are five kanji figures, the first and the third were identical. Someone asked “Why does your bike say ‘pig dog pig bird horse?’” He says “Nah man, it says N-I-N-J-A. That’s how you spell ‘Ninja’ in Japanese.”
Might be the seals to some high level jutsu.
I was thinking of getting 何か日本語で “nanika nihongo de” and if someone would ask me what it meant I’d say “something in Japanese”
I had a roommate that asked me for ideas for a tattoo and I told him to just get ‘Chinese Symbols’ written in all caps on him.
The amazing bastard did it.
I’ve wanted to get Leviticus 19:18 tattooed on me somewhere prominently for years, but too many people would not get the joke and think I was religious.
Reading through various translations, the first part seems to say "don’t cut/gash your body in honor/memory/mourning of the dead, but most of the translations leave it somewhat ambiguous (at least to me) as to whether it means “don’t tattoo yourself in honor/memory/mourning of the dead” or just, “don’t tattoo yourself at all”. Also, it sounds as though cutting/gashing yourself for other reasons is isn’t breaking any rules.
Don’t ruin my good time.
Sorry, lol, that was definitely not my intention! I’ve definitely heard about the “no tattoos” thing before, especially for those following Judaism, but I’d never read the relevant text before, so it definitely surprised me. I may have to ask my sister about it, since that’s definitely her area of study.
I met someone with a “Man shall not lie with another man” tattoo.
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That verse is literally the previous chapter to the “don’t get tattoos” verse. Why did he think one was important enough to get tattooed while ignoring the other?
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He really chose to get that tattooed?!
There was no way a conversation with this guy would go well, so I’m going to be stuck with these questions forever.
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well, I’ll bite. What’s it mean?
Literally “something in Japanese”
Something in Japanese
Yeah, but what exactly?
No, What’s on second
Then who’s on first?
Yes.
Something in Japanese! What’s on my back?
Dude! What does it say?
What doesn’t say anything, he’s on second.
Sweet! What does mine say?
DUDE! What does mine say?
Alright, I’ll bite. What’s it mean?
I went out raging when i was younger and i met a girl and a tattoo artist and we got shitfaced together. At some point we wanted to get a dumb ass tattoo. We both had a lot of tattoos already, so it was just one for the collection. The artist was originally from japan, but he kept saying that his japanese isn’t that great. We still insisted on getting some japanese letters. He tattooed her what he thought: enjoyer of garlic bread translated to, and i wanted one that said garlic boy. We came up with it individually because we talked a lot about garlic bread and one of my favourite bands is garlic boys. And i thought it’s funny. She got her tattoo, but the guy was so fucked up that he fell into a coma after that. I didn’t get my garlic boy tattoo, and i thought to get it anyway, but it would never be as funny as getting it from a drunk japanese dude who spoke very bad japanese.
I never tattooed it on myself, or anyone else, but I used to work at a local greasy spoon, and knew a Professor of English that came in regularly, who was originally from China. I asked him for the name specific characters that phonetically made up the syllables of my and my girlfriend’s names, he went to wait for his food, and came back with the characters he thought would work best. I used those to burn the characters into the weed stash box that she and I had made.
We told everyone that asked that we had no clue what it actually meant, it just sounded like our names.
But…what did it mean?
English names tend do just get characters that sound phonetically like their English pronunciation. As such, a lot of names, especially longer ones, don’t mean anything. If you directly translated them, a lot of the time you’d get like “cabbage the horse wheel” or something.
If you directly translated them, a lot of the time you’d get like “cabbage the horse wheel” or something.
That reminds me of the “Password Strength” comic by xkcd. All right, it’s settled. Next time I need new password, I’m feeding random names into a phonetic name translator.
So the characters are still words, right? As in not phonetics? Would it be like someone named Tristan getting the Spanish word Triste because it sounds like Tristan?
So the characters are still words, right?
Most likely yes. All characters in Chinese are defined jointly by the way it’s written, the pronunciation, and meaning. You can’t invent new characters like you would a new English word and have something that can be read out loud because there’s no system for deriving pronunciation from the written character itself.
I say most likely because there are still some characters that are phonetic in that their meaning is just the sound, but these don’t cover the whole spectrum of possible sounds in the language as far as I know. They also wouldn’t look as nice in tattoo form since they all use the same radical.
Tristán is a proper local name in Spanish
I’m aware, it was just the first English name and Spanish word I could think of that sounded similar for the example.
The Chinese English professor told me that my name meant something like “strong ox” and hers meant “beautiful lotus,” but I have no way to verify that, as I no longer have the box. She does.
i would guess your name is John? “strong ox” seems 犟 to me(upper part is strong, bottom ox), beautiful lotus i got no idea.
Shawn actually. But that does seem similar to the character he gave me
Ooo may I have a guess - Daniel and Lilian?
edit - typo
Nope.
Ah nevermind then. Thought I got what the characters were haha
Upvote because I was sure you’d have it.