For example, in this photo sent in by NDC of his friend’s new tattoo:
The poor chump was told this character meant "vengeance". If the intended character was 魁 (head, chief), then the cloud has completely covered the two important dots. Thus, the character is meaningless.
There is an old Chinese idiom called 畫蛇添足. Literally, it means “draw a snake and add feet to it”, or “to do something unnecessary”.
Apart from the mistake, that's just one really ugly tattoo.
ReplyDeleteoh my, don't the clouds make it look SOO Chinesey?!
ReplyDeleteLove the story from which the idiom originated.
Without the two dots, does it become another word? Or is it just rendered meaningless?
ReplyDeleteyay! more snakes with feet!
ReplyDeleteActually, in China some designs (especially ads, logos, etc) will manipulate characters in strange ways. And replacing one or more "dots" (chinese characters do not actually have any dots per se, they are just very short lines) with something else (a flower, or whatever) is an effect I've seen several times.
ReplyDeleteThere's also that awful script with curls everywhere that I see quite often, usually related to love, or products/websites aimed at women or girls.
Regardless of whether the Chinese is correct, you should not get a tattoo if you are a hairy person. It just looks bad. No one wants to try to read it through all that hair.
ReplyDeleteA cartoon snake with feet along with that saying would make an awesomely funny tattoo, come to that.
ReplyDelete"draw a snake and add feet to it." reminds me of strongbad and his DAGRON. Though what was all the wispyness around the tattoo meant to be?
ReplyDelete