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.
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.
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
Trolling level expert 😂
Who’s on first?
That’s the kind of stupid I like.
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!”
宫保鸡丁
kung pao chicken.
he thought it was super funny, like he was in on the joke.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Hentai Gaijin
Also reminds me of this story of a guy who wanted to have his name tattooed in Japanese. His name is Gary. And in Japanese it’s written in Katakana like this ゲリ but Gary didn’t think that looked cool and wanted to have it written in Kanji. So the artist gave him a tattoo of 下痢 which is pronounced as geri. Which actually means diarrhea.
Not sure if it’s true but would be funny as hell if it was.
Geri is my favourite Indonesian crackers, but not so much the chocolate ones…
Should’ve been ゲーリー, not ゲリ. No wonder people got confused.
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 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.
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
Removed by mod
it’s old, because it has reddit silver, but it’s not that old, because it has reddit silver.
there are no awards on Reddit anymore ?
Unfortunately, it’s been dead for a couple of years now, but this blog used to translate everyone’s Asian-language tattoos.
A significant number of them use characters that are not from any language at all.
Quite a few that do have meanings are pretty funny, sometimes are quite ironic too.
https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/
Edit: I forgot about this, but it’s still on the front page of that blog and I laughed all over again.
Is this real?
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
That is actually the same thing.
变态外人
biàntài wàirénAsian 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 dunno, I have some workout trousers with a Chinese logogram on them. Dunno what it means. Hope I won’t ever
