http://www.zaotattoo.com/images/muriel/54.php
名言 means "wise words" or "famous saying" and 最初 is "beginning" or "initial".
Obviously this person has never heard of the wise words from Dr. Gregory House, Seth MacFarlane, Red vs. Blue, Fox News (it is a bit strange to see "Fox News" associated with "wise words"), and Bill Maher.
It looks like those two mystery characters are very very poorly written "ni" and "no" in Japanese.
ReplyDeleteAlan says...
ReplyDeleteThis is part of a Japanese sentence. The non-kanji characters are the Japanese hiragana に and の, so the whole thing reads:
名言に最初の…
Meigen ni saisho no...
Without the rest of the tattoo (and the sentence), it is difficult to translate, but it says something like "the first ... as a witty remark...."
My guess: a crappy machine translation of "In the beginning was the word," made even crappier by the calligraphy in the tattoo.
ReplyDeleteEither way, it still doesnt make sense. =P
ReplyDelete"In wise word, the very first..."
ReplyDeleteThe very first what, though?
"In the beginning was the Word..." sounds a lot better than "Smart from the start", especially since that photo got posted here.
ReplyDeleteReminds me of a t-shirt of mine. Somebody had just taken a Japanese text, cut a piece of it and printed on the t-shirt. Some characters from the middle of a sentence are seen, and totally incomprehensible. Maybe I'll post its photo to Tian.
ReplyDelete