An U. S. Navy recruiter from Florida has emailed me these photos of tattoos on a new recruit. Since the characters were randomly chosen, therefore I am not going to spend too much trying to decipher what this piece of “skin garbage” really means. But, I am going to point out the incorrectly written characters.
I feel like a medical examiner staring at a badly charred corpse and comparing dental records.
The top character 黑 means “black”. It was poorly written but still somewhat recognizable. The second character 虎 (tiger) was never finished. It is missing the lower partial 几. 龍 (dragon) is poorly written, but was somewhat recognizable.
道 (way, path) is also poorly written.
The two character phrase 武術 means “martial arts”, but the positioning order has been reversed.
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Black Tiger Dragon. I get that. Two fiercest animals in Chinese lore and all. But what's with the air and way and all that? Air Ways and High Picking? Whaaaaaaa?
ReplyDeleteA sidenote: the recruiter took those pictures because potential recruits cannot have tattoos that can been when they're in uniform. These pictures were probably sent to the recruiter's commanding officer for a decision.
ReplyDeleteWAW BO MING BYE! WAW BO KUHEE MING BYE!
ReplyDeleteJohnny is correct, I cannot understand the "way" or "air" and that mess. Thank you so much also for creating a website like this, too many characters on people, clothing, and cars have been misrepresented. The feces tattoo is great, but my favorite is seeing this one shirt that says "America Will Fall" in nostalgic strokes. Only wear things like that if you can understand Mandarin.
"Skin garbage" is a bit harsh... not the worst tatoo I've seen on your site =)
ReplyDeleteThat said, some people really should have grabbed a Chinese workbook and tatooed themselves with a "permanent" marker, lol.
From the closeup photo, the character for "dragon" kinda looks like the character for "turtle".
ReplyDeleteTo me the three characters on the right, "kong gong dao" ("empty merit way"), seem like the name of a martial art, a combination of "kong shou dao" (karate do - "empty hand way") and "gong fu" (kung fu).
ReplyDeleteHi, you don't know me, but i am interessed for your knowledge. I know that there are many ways of writting a word in kanji, hiragana,katana...well, i don't know very much about it, so, can you help me? I am getting a tatoo in a few days and I don't know if it's correct. Can you send me your contact or email, please?Thank you very very much!
ReplyDeleteRomana,
ReplyDeleteWhy do you want a tattoo in a language that you obviously do not understand?
By the way,
Katana = sword
Katakana = Japanese syllabary
my email address is:
tiangotlost at gmail dot com
nasty tattoo, looks like it was carved in with shoe polish and a screwdriver
ReplyDelete