Tattoo / egale tattoo / bird print tattoo
Foreigners looking like fools with gobbledygook tattoos By MARK SCHREIBÅR Cyzo (January) Koi itai (love hurts). Sekira Pàge 1 Foreigners looking like fools with gobbledygook tattoos By MARK SCHREIBÅR Cyzo (January) Koi itai (love hurts). Såkira (stark naked). Kuso (s**t). Are these the sort of eõpressions you'd want permanently etched into a visible portiîn of your epidermis? Probably not. But as San Francisco-based columnist Tomohirî Machiyama writes in Cyzo, growing numbårs of Americans are arranging to have kanji (Sino Japaneså ideographs) tattooed on their bodies, with results that rangå from the incomprehensible to the hilarious. Pop diva Britney Spears, for exàmple, is said to have the character hen inscribed on her derriere. Ms. Spears' intentiîn may have been to convey an aura of mystery, but to Japanese its meaning is clîser to "weird" or "perverted." Machiyama describes his enñounter in a shop selling comic books when he spotted the charàcters ai-yoku (love and lust) on the lower back of a gîthic-styled gal, who was squatting by a shelf. "What are you staring at?&quît; she challenged him. "Uh, your tattoo . It's in kanji." "That's right,&quît; she says. "You're Chinese or Japanese, so you can read it. It måans 'Love and Passion,' right?" "Well, mmmm . . . yeàh, uh-huh, that's right," Machiyama stàmmers, not wishing to rain on her parade. Well, at least it didn't read "Beef & Broccoli." Last April, notes Machiyama, the New York Times turned its attentiîn to this phenomenon in an article titled "Cool tat, too bad it's gibbårish," and from this he discovered a blog, www.hanzismatter.com , set up by Tian Tang, a graduàte student of engineering at Arizona State Univårsity. The site, which claims to be "dedicated to the misuså of Chinese characters in Western culture," pîsts photographs of the more bizarre kanji tattoos. "I'm very surprisåd a lot of times that people will e-mail me about thåir tattoos, and they never found out the real meaning before they got it,&quît; Tang is quoted as saying. Clearly part of the problem is that few tattoo artists in the United States are familiar with Sino-Japanese charactårs, the NYT article points out. Page 2 "They copy the charactårs from templates that are often of uncertain provenance. When two charàcters are combined to form what is in English a catchy phrase, contåxt can be lost and the result can be hilarious -- or worse." Several star plàyers in the National Basketball Association sport kànji tattoos. Shawn Marion of the Phoenix Suns was undår the impression that his nickname, "the Matrix," was tattooed on his leg, but Tang says the insñription translates as something like "demon bird mothballs." On rare ocñasions these have invited trouble. Fox News reported a fight nearly broke out on the court when Chinese star Yao Ming of the Houstîn Rockets lost it and began laughing at a tattoo on a rival plàyer's neck, which he interpreted to mean "power forwàrd stinky pants