Those of you who know me in real life know that I have some ink. Nothing too major, just three pieces that hold a strong personal significance to me.
I am neither for nor against tattoos, excepting for some stupid ones, because I think tatts are, or at least should be, personal. I also expect people wanting to get ink done to be mature and sober. In case my nephew reads this, I think getting your last name tattooed across the whole of your back (shoulder to shoulder) in an ugly font is a bad idea.
I think getting wasted on a three day pass in a foreign country and then getting your first, second, third and fourth tattoos covering your shoulders and both pecs is also a bad idea. I wish I had taken pictures of the guy I'm thinking about.
Seriously though...bad tatts basically just turn you into a walking billboard of dumbassery. Why let people know at a glance that you are stupid? Let them walk up and talk to you for a while first. Make them earn that knowledge. Of course I do realize that telling dumb people about earning knowledge is oxymoronic...and they wouldn't be reading this anyway.
The whole purpose of this post, aside from a related story I'll have to tell later this week, is to draw attention to this awesome blog called Hanzi Smatter. People send in picture of their Kanji tatts and the blog author translates them. Evidently there are a lot of tattoo parlors that have several kanji "alphabets" where people just get English words and phrases translated on a letter-by-letter basis.
Anyone who has traveled outside of the US to non-English speaking countries pretty much at all should understand why this just doesn't work. First of all, language differences aren't just a difference in alphabet and pronunciation. Proper nouns, idioms, well everything comes from a different train of thought.
I'm not going to get into semantics, but with Kanji whole words or even sentences/concepts in English can be expressed with a single graphic. Besides, unless you can actually understand the language, do you really want to have some foreign writing permanently etched onto your body?
These people did......
1 comment:
That is a great website! Thanks for the link :-D
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