A failed tattoo? Not necessarily.

The tattoo in the picture below is often given as an example of a failed tattoo (I've founded the same confusion even on hanzismatter.blogspot, a blog which belongs to someone who seems to have vast knowledge of Chinese and Japanese languages).

If we consider only the Chinese reading of these characters, the tattoo's meaning is "fool, sucker" - 呆 (pronunciation: dai with the first tone) = dull; dull-minded, simple, stupid; 子 (pronunciation: zi with the third tone) = offspring, child; together they form the word 呆子 (daizi) which means "fool, stupid, sucker".

On the other hand, in Japanese 呆子 is just one of the nearly 300 ways (I know, it's hard to believe that there are really that many) to write the popular name "Akiko".

In conclusion, this is not (such) a failed tattoo.

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Tattoos fails: kanji / hanzi mistakes

Recently I found this image on ratemyink.com:

and here is the description of the image, sent by the tattoo's owner: "This is technically my third tattoo. The artist is Dan Greuling from Creepy Creations in Londonderry, NH. With my design idea, Dan did the entire work freehand. The symbols come from the Five Phase (constructive/destructive) Cycle of Traditional Chinese Medicine (clockwsise from top: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water). They show growth and break down ie. how everything is connected. The root system now extends down to my left foot ending in the double koru. There is much more to this. Please ask. (For those who don't know how this website (ratemyink.com) is working: if you have a tattoo and you want to find out what other people think about your tattoo, you can send a picture with the tattoo along with a short explanation about the meaning of the tattoo.)

Unfortunately, the symbol on the top of the tattoo is not the ideogram for tree, but a meaningless phonetic katakana syllable 'ho'. The "tree / wood / timber" symbol (木) has no hook at the bottom and the 3rd and 4th strokes are attached to the 1st. In the image below you can see both the ideogram for "wood / tree" and the katakana character "ho":

In conclusion, before you get a Kanji / Hanzi tattoo it's better to spend some time researching the authenticity of the symbols’ meaning.

Tribal scorpion tattoo

My last tattoo design: a scorpion holding a rose between his pincers:

The text is written in chinese: 致命的愛 (reading: zhìmìng de ài) in and means fatal love (or deadly love).

For more tattoos designs with scorpions visit my website, seiza.ro

Chinese ideograms tattoos: common mistakes

Chinese characters have a complex beauty as well as individual meanings. People who get Chinese tattoos are often drawn to this. Unfortunately, the flip-side is that there are a lot of pitfalls for the unwary. I have personally seen such elementary mistakes as a tattoo with the Chinese Symbol being tattooed reversed or defaced.The vivid samples of such mistakes of Chinese Symbol tattoos as below :

1.  Missing strokes and defacing Symbols . The majority of tattoo artists in western countries know nothing about Chinese, not to mention how to write them correctly. Missing strokes are common mistakes and thus making the tattoos meaningless, and the poor penmanship defaces the Chinese characters and makes them look ugly. Wearing meaningless Chinese symbol tattoos is embarrassing. The following photos are the examples of missing strokes and degaced chinese symbols, the red characters besides the circle are the correct one.
2. Chinese Symbols Being Tattooed Backwards. A much more common mistake is that the Chinese characters are flipped horizontally or vertically and thus is a mirror image of what it should be. I think this might be the problem when people use temporary tattoos or work from those because after a while they might get confused as to which side is the correct one. To have a Chinese symbol tattooed on you backwards is also embarrassing. The pictures below show you how a Chinese character being tattooed backwards. the red characters are correct one.
3. Mistranslation. Chinese characters are complex and can easily be mean something other than intended. Get the wrong one and your new Chinese symbol tattoo will be a permanent source of embarrassment to you! A lady has told me her Chinese symbol tattoos experiences:/p> After deciding have a Chinese writing tattoo, She went to Chinese restaurant and pull over a Chinese waiter and asked him to write out the word "free" in Chinese characters for her, free has two meaning in English dictionary, the first one is free of charge and the second meaning is freedom which was the lady wanted, the waiter wrote down the first meaning in Chinese for the lady. The lady ended up with the sign "free of charge" on her skin and it was end up with spending US$900 to remove the tattoos.
4. Do not know the meaning. I have come across many western people who do not know the meaning of their Chinese writing tattoos. Tattoo is a way of self expression. If anyone curiously ask you the meaning of your tattoos, answering them either do not know or make up the meaning is quite awkward.

Source: http://www.chinese-tattoos-designs.com