"Air"

http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A50523/high/bmegl068697.jpgThe top character 空 is correct and means "empty, hollow, bare, deserted". The center character appears to be a Japanese katakana, may be either シ or ツ. The bottom character is incorrectly written 氣 or 気, which means "air, gas, steam, vapor; spirit".空氣 (空気) = air; atmosph...

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Friend or Foe

http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A50817/high/bmegl114051.jpg Body Modification Ezine has the largest online gallery which features all sorts of body modification. One section I am particularly interested in is the Kanji tattoos, where clients and tattooists submit their pieces to be showcased. Although almost all the photos have some kind of caption,...

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Radical "Dream"

http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A50817/high/bmegl115333.jpgBesides the disproportionably tattooed characters, 夢 (dream) is mirrored. 過激 [かげき] are done correctly. In Japanese, they mean "extreme" or "radica...

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More Fat Please

Photo has been removed on behalf of Ms. Kerry Fitzmaurice's (aka. SpeedyTomato) request. The original can be seen here.This photo of a spinal tattoo belongs to user "SpeedyTomato" on MySpace.com. Several readers have emailed it to me and want to know what the characters meant.Other than the randomness of the phrases, the only mistake I found was...

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Iron Fury

This bad ass screen-print t-shirt by Utility brand is sold in Target stores. From the English caption as well as the Bruce Lee look-alike in a fighting pose, one would easily assume the Chinese characters on the shirt would be in the realm of some sort of fierce combat. Not so.燙斗 means cloth iron. Extreme ironing inde...

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Five Confucian Virtues

Reader Samantha emails in a photo of her fellow student from college. It is a tattoo of five Confucian virtues 仁義礼智信 which represent "benevolence, justice, courtesy, wisdom, and sincerity". From the look of this tattoo, he needs a little more work on "justic...

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"May Be"

One young lady emailed me her tattoo with the following story: "This girl who was learning Mandarin was doing body painting and I asked her to write one word on me that she thought summed me up. What she told she wrote was the word "maybe".I took a picture of it and took it to a Mandarin restaurant and asked them to translate it for me. They said...

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Lack of Translation in Tattoo Publications

One of the biggest problems I have noticed among tattoo publications is lack of translation. Many tattoo publications would showcase artists' work and fans' tattoos of Chinese and Japanese characters, yet do not provide the translation, nor verify if the characters are done correctly.Since tattoo is a form of visual art plus Chinese and Japanese are...

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Hand Warmer and Air Conditioner

This photo was in the October 2005 issue of Skin and Ink magazine. Since there was no translation for the tattoo, I don't know if it was the owner's intention to have "hand warmer" and "air conditioner" tattooed on his body.手暖爐 = hand warmer冷氣機 = air conditio...

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