Most people love their mother or mothers (children with lesbian parents and/or born from fertilized eggs via surrogate mother would have more than one mother). But, it takes a special talent to screw up “mommy” so bad that it would be read as “female horse rice”.
http://www.tatuadores.com/japo-kini-daktat-sevilla-DSCF2568.JPG
媽咪 is Chinese transliteration of “mommy”.
Too bad the tattooist has split 媽 into two characters 女 (female), 馬 (horse), and forgot about the partial 口 in 咪.
I hope her mother is proud.
frightful. who designed it, i wonder?
ReplyDeleteThat tattoo isn't very pretty. the flowers are nice but that thing running from top left to bottom right obscuring the characters is weird.
ReplyDeleteThe 女 also looks totally misdrawn and ugly, if I might say so.
ReplyDeleteI can see how 妈咪 would be a transliteration from mommy, but why? If you're going to use Chinese characters for something like this, why not use the real translation in Chinese instead?
ReplyDeleteI just love the way Westerners who know nothing about Chinese try to make it mean whatever they cook up in their little minds.
I believe that swooping thing that goes from top left to bottom right is supposed to be the wind blowing.
ReplyDeleteWhen I saw Eri's name in an older post I cringed.
I had a translation done by Eri Takase and have since recommended people to her. I didn't wait for the final work to show up before taking it to a tattoo artist and I ended up photoshopping the best parts of each final rendition she scanned in. The stroke order is incorrect in my tattoo, but it was due to how the tattoo artist added to it, but in the wrong spots. I've decided to leave it alone and not ask to get it rounded out because that would just make it look worse.
http://flickr.com/photos/8pril/sets/72057594064183353/
My regret is not in getting the original tattoo but in the placement of it. Because it was so high up I had my tattoo artist design around it into a half backpiece.
媽咪 is commonly used in Cantonese when referring to "mom". sometimes it's written out in that way, too, but never so badly.
ReplyDelete媽咪 isn't simply transliteration anymore. it's something that is used regularly enuf to have been given standard 漢字. just because a word is borrowed doesn't mean it's not a valid word in the language into which it is borrowed. the crime here is that it was written so poorly.
ReplyDeleteHey Tian! Thanks for mentioning my family in your post - you don't see too often where someone says "two mommies." Thanks for pointing out that families come in many shapes and sizes these days. :)
ReplyDeleteI'll bet her mother is also proud of how exceptional her daughter turned out to be. I can't remember the last time I saw a young woman with a tacky tattoo above her ass. Nice job, Mom.
ReplyDeleteMay I quote George Carlin?
ReplyDelete"New Rule: Just because your tattoo has Chinese characters in it doesn't make you spiritual. It's right above the crack of your ass. And it translates to "beef with broccoli." The last time you did anything spiritual, you were praying to God you weren't pregnant. You're not spiritual. You're just high."
Red Horse,
ReplyDeleteThe quote was not by George Carlin, it was from Bill
Maher on May 13, 2005.
maybe they were trying to write "mah faan," (cantonese)or the hard-to-translate-into-English form of 'difficult' or 'troublesome'
ReplyDelete