http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A60302/high/bmepb233296.jpg
The only caption this March 2nd photo had was “my beautiful tat” in BMEzine’s Kanji tattoo gallery.
Assuming the first characters is a butchered 子 (offspring, child) and last character 神 (spirit, god) has somehow split into two parts. Since in Japanese, 子供 【こども】 means "child; children", therefore 子供神 roughly translates as “child offering god” or "children god". (thanks Paul).
I don’t know if that is a good idea for a young lady to advertise herself as “child offering god”, unless she is in the business of selling her eggs or being a surrogate mother.
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Together, the first two characters, 子供, mean ‘child’ in Japanese. However, as far as I know, the whole is still meaningless — especially with 神 split up. And that penmanship makes my eyes bleed!
ReplyDeleteHa. I bet she thinks it means "child of God."
ReplyDeleteThat ... is written with eyeshadow pencil and is easily erasable, right? Right??? RIGHT???
ReplyDeleteI'm with KKS. I cringed at the tattoo. it's awful.
ReplyDeleteOut of curiosity, how would you write "child of god" correctly?
ReplyDeleteKKS yeah it is eyeliner pencil or if not that person should sue...and if she were to donate her eggs in future...prospective parents be warned
ReplyDeleteChild of God - kami(sama) no ko(domo).
ReplyDelete神の子 - child of a god/the gods
神様の子 - child of God
神の子供 - children of a god/the gods
神様の子供 - children of God
Just posting to say that this tattoo looks pretty damn awful. I mean SERIOUSLY!!!
ReplyDeleteFaith in humanity bar:
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Wow... Just wow, that is awful. I actually thought at first that the red blotches indicated a serious skin problem. I guess the tatooist did a good job of replicating the trendy look of scribbling in crayon.
ReplyDeletei am totally a fan of your site...just curious, how do you feel about chinese people getting chinese characters tattooed on themselves? this is assuming they actually are native speakers and do know what the tattoo means. do you think that it's silly regardless of race?
ReplyDeleteI personally has no objections about the practice of tattooing, as long as they are done well and correct.
ReplyDeleteI am also with kks.
ReplyDeleteSo being a native speaker is the only thing that qualifies you to get a tattoo in a foreign language? What about Tian? He's obviously near-native in English, so could he get an English tattoo or not? What about a Chinese-American that's NOT native?
ReplyDeleteI don't have any "objections" to tattoos either, even the ones shown here. How can I object to something someone does to themselves, for themselves? After all, if they tell me that it's "aesthetic" and not meant to communicate anything, then there really isn't anything I can say to that. You can't critique a sentence by grammatical rules if it's not a sentence.
I don't think this site exists to critique anything (correct me if I'm wrong, Tian). This site exists to raise awareness that there is a group of people out there (a very, very large one in this case) that are not going to see your poorly-done Hanzi tattoo the same way you are. Just looking at the tattoos here, it's obvious that not enough people are aware of this fact. Many of them seem to think that they can just ballpark grammar and (espeically) writing styles and still have the same effect they intended. This is of course not the case, which is why I like this site so much. But while we can laugh at them for this, if the tattoo achieves the effect they intended then that's all there is to it. After all art, like humor, is completely subjective.
Andrew
a japanese friend of mine saw this tattoo, and said that in japanese it's okay. It would mean "I don't want children," or "I don't need children." or something to that effect. "子供いらない。" he said, not as the reading, but the meaning...
ReplyDeleteanonymous:
ReplyDeleteYour Japanese friend probably mistook the bottom character for 用 (which is understandable, given the poor penmanship). Perhaps they thought the characters were supposed to read 子供無用 (こどもむよう)?
At any rate, I think that the "tattooist" simply improperly divided 神 into ネ and 申.
Wow...that was right in front of our faces but no one saw it... it goes to show how much penmanship can make a difference. Considering the context 子供不用 must be what this person was going for, but wow...I certainly couldn't see it at first.
ReplyDeleteWhat it looked like to me on second examination (first examination resulted in my burying my head in sadness) is a katakana ユ with an extender bar, the 子供の供, a katakana ネ, and then 申すの申. But that makes even less sense than the other interpretations put forward here.
ReplyDelete