Tuesday, August 7, 2007

The Banta Family

This person went to Charlie at Asylum Tattoo of Covington, Kentucky and got some names tattooed, assuming they are family members names. The end result is posted in BMEzine's gallery dated Aug. 4, 2007.


http://bmeink.com/A70804/high/bmepb577039.jpg

My fellow katakana tattoo connoisseur Alan has this to say:

As these things go, I guess this one is not so bad. It appears to be the names of people in a family, with the family name バンタ [Banta] written horizontally and the given names ジム [Jim], アネット [Annette] and タナー [Tanner] written vertically under it.

The tattoo artist did make a mistake in that the final stroke in the name Tanner should be vertical instead of horizontal. This appears to be a common mistake that we also saw on Kimberley's tattoo.

5 comments:

  1. Ah, Covington. I know it well, having spent the majority of my youth there. At least they didn't botch it too much.

    Hope you're well!

    -Paul

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  2. Since the family name was horizontal I first thought the rest might be too, which yields "Tuna" as one of the kids names.

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  3. The fact that the right-most name is indented a little lower than the others is confusing as well. I also thought it needed to be read from left to right, given that indentation and the horizontal "ー".

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  4. Now that you mention it, I did at first try to read the names horizontally, giving the rather unlikely but humorously named family of Jia, Muneta, Tuna and Toe. (With another kid!)

    I guess you can think of it as something like a crossword puzzle.

    -Alan

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  5. Actually, I think the horizontal "ー" is probably correct if you consider the context. I recently got myself a hanko (Japanese seal) and found out that the horizontal ー is standard for seals, even though the names are written vertically. (My name in katakana is マシュー.) Perhaps whoever did the tattoo was following that idea.

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