Tuesday, June 14, 2005

July 2005 Issue of Flash Magazine

Sometimes I wonder if anyone in the tattoo community really care about the accuracy of tattoos of Chinese Hanzi and Japanese Kanji characters.

After flipping through a few pages of the July 2005 issue of FLASH magazine,




and I see this:



I don't expect every single tattoo artist to hold Degrees in Asian Language Study, but when you are a major publishing company, please have some decency and do some checking, so the same error will not continue.

Not only the image (I hope it is only the image but not the tattoo) is reversed, the character (love) is missing a middle dot on the top.


10 comments:

  1. It is entirely possible that the photographer or layout artist flipped the image in the publication process.

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  2. FLASH magazine is a major publication in the tattoo community, having the mirrored image published is pretty bad.

    Especially considering many tattoo artists get their ideas from these magazines.

    Regardless, the magazine should have done a better job of catching this type of error before send the magazine to the public.

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  3. Even if the image was flipped during the publication process, the character 愛 is still missing a middle dot on top.

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  4. Ah yes, the old "headless backwards love" tattoo.

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  5. oh it is missing and it make be possible but then the artist wasnt playing attention.

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  6. "Love" in Kanji or Hanzi seems to be such a trend. As has been asked millions of times over... Why not get that word tattooed in your native tongue?

    It makes me so sad every time I see how butchered these tattoos can become.

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  7. Hey Tian, did you point it out to the magazine yet?

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  8. Correct me if I am wrong, but that looks like someone's arm and I don't think it could be just a flipped image: the characters would have to be oriented relative to the bicep which seems to be to the left. You reverse the bicep to the right and the character is forwards but still backwards on the arm. Maybe the real problem is the person has a bicep and tricep that are shaped identically so the artist did not know which was front ;-)

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  9. re: anon "I don't think it could be just a flipped image", i think you're assuming incorrectly that it has to be a certain arm, or that flipping it won't make it switch arms. your arms are really just mirror images of each other. the left looks like the rite in a mirror, and vice-versa. if it's on the rite arm, then the tattoo is not backwards, but if it's on the left (as depicted in the post), then it is. either way looks completely natural to me (the arm, that is, not the hanzi). there's no way (for me) to tell which arm it's on, but i hope it's on the rite arm. if you can tell which arm it is, please lemme kno how.

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  10. Seeing is believing!

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