Since the only way I’d ever get a tattoo is if I were rip-roaring drunk to the point of unconsciousness and amongst very cruel friends — which seems to be the context of most tattoo acquisitions — I suspect this (very good) advice on how to select Chinese characters for tattooing (so that you don’t end up with “This dolt paid me to write this” or something else unexpected) is not likely to be heeded.
– Get a sketch or printout of the proposed design.
– Ask several Chinese people what they think.
– Don’t just ask if it means a certain thing – the person you ask may not wish to disappoint you so may agree that it does, when in actuality it would be better to use different characters.
– If relevant, try and explain what deeper meaning you want to convey – maybe somebody will suggest a well known idiom to use instead of a literal translation.
Or may I offer another piece of advice:
Don’t have some guy you don’t know poking ink under your skin with a frickin’ needle, especially if you don’t really know what the hell he’s writing there.
(via J-Walk)
I went through that very issue when I turned 25. I asked a Chinese friend of mine to write “writer” in calligraphy. He came up with a few variations, and the most visually pleasing to my eyes was the variant for “little story writer.”
Then I had the tattoo put on before my birthday party. I showed it off to my eager friends, and my source looked at it and said: “Well, it says that somethign is little, all right.”
The laughter was, as they say, deafening.
There’s an urban myth, I suspect, about one gentleman who sports a tattoo that says, “Too dumb to look this up in a dictionary.”