We’ve all seen or heard about that non-Asian person getting a tattoo in Chinese or Japanese. . . who only realized later that they’d been permanently inked with some idiotic or nonsensical phrase. One time, I saw a guy proudly sporting the Chinese word for “pig” tattooed on his bicep. (I’m guessing he looked up his Chinese horoscope and didn’t realize that in Chinese, “boar” and “pig” are the same word.) Well, it looks like people in China have a similar fascination with “exotic” tattoos–there’s a trend of Chinese youngsters getting tattoos in European languages. And, like their Western counterparts, many don’t really know the meaning of their tattoos.
“I think it says, ‘I’ll love you forever,’” explained ‘Ting Ting,’ a customer at Beijing’s Golden Phoenix tattoo parlor. “I didn’t have any particular reason,” she told McClatchy News, “I just liked the way the Greek letters looked.”
Scan the walls of the tattoo shop and you’ll find examples of popular English tattoos like “PrayGod” or “Love & Honesty.” Another says “SaintSinner,” with the “n” spelled backwards.
“There are many people wanting ‘Jesus’ or ‘church.’ Christians like ‘Jesus’,” the manager said.
(8asians via McClatchy News)
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Well, I guess turnabout is fair play. There is one kanji tattoo that’s very popular in the States: “??”. This is supposed to mean “live for today,” but actually it means nothing. The first character does mean “life” but it has a lot of other meanings too, including “birth” and “raw”. The second character means “appear”. It also means “the present” if combined with another character (??) so I guess that’s where the confusion comes from, but at any rate, the combination of these two characters results in a meaningless tattoo.
I once saw a blog comment that a Japanese guy traveling in America made about this very tattoo. He was absolutely amazed and said that maybe it meant something in Chinese, but it in no way meant anything in Japanese. Actually, I checked a Chinese to English dictionary for this combination of characters got no result.
it’s a greek tattoo you stupids:P
actually it means nothing is impossible. good try, haha