Chinese tattoos – common mistakes

The Chinese symbol for love - but are you sure?

Chinese tattoos are increasing in popularity but before you rush off to get inked, here’s some of the most common Chinese Tattoo mistakes. As with any tattoo, a Chinese symbol tattoo will probably have a deep and personal meaning, but make sure your tattoo actually means what you want it to mean.

Did you know that the average Chinese person needs to know five thousand symbols to be able to read their own language?

The Chinese writing system has no alphabet, but relies on a large number of symbols that represents spoken concepts or ideas. There is NO Chinese alphabet and it is crucial to realise that a Chinese symbol represents the entire spoken word. And because there is no alphabet, it is very difficult to translate western names into Chinese symbols. Then you also have to remember that in China your last name comes before your first name. It gets more and more complicated….

Be careful of websites offering Chinese fonts
Hanzi Smatter blogs about the “gibberish Asian font” and points the finger at a website that is selling fake fonts. The site also claims that former Olympic Softball Player Kim Maher’s tattoo uses this font and her tattoo translates as “healthy woman stops achievement flow” – hmmmm, methinks that is not what she probably intended!

Missing Strokes and Poor Script
All tattoo artists have their own artistic style and flair and of course everyone has their own writing style, which is OK with English lettering. However, Chinese calligraphy is a very fine art and adding your own style to Chinese letters and symbols would spoil them, rendering them completely meaningless.

Missing strokes are one of the most common mistakes and having a meaningless or wrongly translated Chinese Character tattoo can lead to embarrassment and ridicule as Britney Spears discovered. She thought her tattoo translated as “mysterious” when in fact it said “strange”.

Confusing Chinese and Japanese symbols
Can you tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese? The Japanese writing system actually uses many Chinese characters in addition to the traditional Japanese scripts of hiragana, and katakana.

Chinese symbols inked backwards
An even more common mistake, than wrong translation, is that the Chinese characters are tattooed from the wrong side of the stencil and end up as a mirror image of what it should be.

Wrong translation from English to Chinese
Chinese symbols are very complex and can easily mean something other than intended. In English we have words that sound the same but have different meanings, e.g. where and wear, bear and bare. It is the same when translating anything to Chinese.

There’s the story of the lady who asked a Chinese waiter to translate the word “free” for her so she could have it inked. She wanted the word to mean “free” as in “freedom”. What she ended up with was a Chinese symbol that meant “free of charge”. It cost her $900 to remove the tattoo.

The New York Times reports that a doting father wanted the Chinese symbols for “one love” inked onto his arm to commemorate the birth of his son. He ended up with “love hurts”.

Are you using traditional or simplified Chinese Characters?
As with attempting to distinguish between Chinese and Japanese symbols, it can also be difficult to tell the difference between simplified and traditional Chinese characters.

In an attempt to increase literacy, simplified characters were adopted by the government of the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s. Based on the traditional characters, some symbols have been altered by reducing the amount of strokes used in their composition. Traditional Chinese characters continue to be used in Macau, Taiwan, Macau, Taiwan, Hong Kong and by many overseas Chinese communities.

It is important when designing your Chinese tattoo, you decide which character set you want to use and then avoid mixing characters from each set.

Make sure you know the exact translation of your Chinese tattoo
Getting a Chinese tattoo just because you like the look of the symbols is NOT a good idea! People are bound to ask you what it means. Even worse, what if someone was able to tell you what it means and it ends up being something distasteful or that you do not like? Like the guy who had a Chinese symbol tattoo for 25 years, before someone told him it said “Coca Cola”!!

Chinese tattoo - what does this translate as?

Don’t choose your Chinese Tattoo off the wall of your Tattoo Parlour – unless it is in China!
Tattoo parlours usually have designs displayed on the walls. However, unless there is a Tattoo Artist available who speaks Chinese and can translate them for you, it is unlikely you will know for certain what you are getting.

So, whatever you do, get your Chinese tattoo symbols translated by a professional or you could end up with something like the symbol on the left.

Translated it means: “Change my diaper”!