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 "justice".
i actually feel that if that tattoo was done correctly, it would be cool. it's not someone's name bogusly translated or anything.. in fact, i can think of a million more horrible things you could get tattooed :)
ReplyDeleteI agree with the first comment on here - this tat would actually be pretty cool looking if done correctly - and as far as stuff on this site goes, it's not too terrible. Even if "justice" is missing a few strokes it's still recognizable. And a gifted tatoo artist might be able to somewhat alieviate the error.
ReplyDeleteWhy do I remember six Confucian virtues?
ReplyDeleteI thought there were EIGHT virtues:
ReplyDelete忠孝仁愛信義和平
I'm a native speaker of Japanese and the 義 looks perfectly fine to me. Some characters look different when written in "brush writing", similar to how English writing becomes different when written in script/cursive.
ReplyDeletekay is correct, the character is technically missing a stroke, but it is also clearly calligraphy - and skilled calligraphy at that. Indeed, a quick look through my handy Japanese calligrapher's reference, 五體字類 attributes a version to 六朝諸碑 (りくちょうしょひ) which bears an exceedingly close resemblance to the one shown here.
ReplyDeletei thought it was propriety (li) 禮 instead of courtesy
ReplyDeletethey can have the same meaning but different characters