Asian Beauty

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.

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?
- I'm thinking that's a combination of a lost bet and some cleverness.
- Is your friend Steve-O?
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.
This is like setting your guest WiFi password to "It's on the wall over there."
- Four words all uppercase?
- I knew a barista that set the wifi pass to "ten bucks".
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 😂
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.
That's the kind of stupid I like.
Who's on first?

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.

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
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.

Ehm... isn't "日本" = "Japan" both in chinese and japanese?
Thats what google translate is telling me anyway
- Yes.
- The subtitle could have been not literal translation. The dialogue could have been "this is kanji for japan" or characters for japan. But the subtitle wrote Chinese for japan, because the movie/speaker was Chinese.... Maybe
That's actually hilarious.

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.

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.
This would be perfect for me and my IBS-D

In Wales road signs are printed in both English and Welsh. When a new sign was being made someone sent the English part to a translator, who's out of office message was in Welsh. They assumed that message was the translation and printed it on the sign.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mistranslated-welsh-traffic-sign/

Not a translation error but the worst tattoo I ever saw on someone was a guy with a bloody tampon tramp stamp.

bloody tampon tramp stamp
"bloody" as in bloody idiot, or "bloody" as in black pudding?
- My guy. My dude. My man.
  Do you know what a tampon is / does? You might be able to infer from that alone.
- I assume this is one of them dual meanings

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"

Even the premise: why would you want a Christian message in Japanese?
- Some guesses: it looks cool, it makes people curious to ask "what's that supposed to mean?", the dude was a christian otaku
- 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?
  https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3781.html
- 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."
- They were a big fan of Silence.
As someone who went to Japan, yeah I’d expect that shit there more than in America honestly

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?
- 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.

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.

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 ?

That is actually the same thing.

I want "pretty nice and vanilla guy" tattooed on me, and I'll say it means "horrible pervert"

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
Don't leave out the part about your omniscience

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.

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 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.

Same picture