Saturday, October 18, 2008

Dad 9.15.94

Alan and I both can't figure out what this tattoo is about.


http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A81015/high/obkj-my-first-tattoo.jpg

Is it 伕, "common laborer", or 佚?


Update: This tattoo belongs to "Joker" in Rankmytattoos.com
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10 comments:

  1. HanenosukeOctober 18, 2008 at 7:16 PM

    供, maybe?

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousOctober 19, 2008 at 12:29 AM

    I see that one possible Mandarin pronunciation for 佚 is "die2". Maybe it's supposed to sound like "Dad."

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousOctober 20, 2008 at 3:31 AM

    I'd say it's 佚. The bottom part's wrong, but in some fonts it does have those tick marks. Seeing as it means both "lost" and "peace." Seeing as there is a date at the bottom, I'm guessing that "Dad" being mentioned passed away on that date and is lost and at peace now. Just a guess.

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  4. AnonymousOctober 28, 2008 at 12:24 AM

    I agree with anonymous who says it's 佚 for the loss of the father to death. When I first saw it I thought of Chinese 失, which wouldn't make sense of the whole character, but that was because I didn't know the character 佚. John

    ReplyDelete
  5. Jonathan MerzOctober 29, 2008 at 4:44 AM

    Could it possibly be a messed-up version of 侠, which I've seen used in other tattoos to as a translation of "hero"? Maybe he's trying to say his late father was his hero.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Alan SiegristOctober 29, 2008 at 10:44 AM

    Could it possibly be a messed-up version of 侠, which I've seen used in other tattoos to as a translation of "hero"?

    Well, it could be 侠 (as good of guess as any), but how exactly is this "hero"? My first association of its meaning would be "tomboy" (きゃん [kyan] in Japanese).

    Is this guy saying his dear, departed father was a tomboy?

    That's kinda weird, but the whole thing is pretty sad.

    -Alan

    ReplyDelete
  7. AnonymousOctober 31, 2008 at 5:41 PM

    Looks like a messy 侁.

    Not that "crowd" makes much sense.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Alan SiegristNovember 18, 2008 at 12:59 PM

    I am beginning to think that the first anon had it right.

    Maybe the character was supposed to be 爹 [read die1 and meaning "Dad"], but someone somehow looked it up wrong in a dictionary and ended up with 佚 instead, since it has a similar reading die2.

    This seems even more likely because the tattooist wasn't even able to write the character properly.

    Poor old Dad.

    -Alan

    ReplyDelete
  9. AnonymousNovember 27, 2008 at 7:18 PM

    There is still a possiblity that it is indeed 佚. The word has a meaning of being "lost" (or omitted). Combined with the other parts of the tattoo, I'm inclined to agree with the second Anonymous on his guess.

    ... then again, this is not a common word at all. We might be giving the tattooist a little too much credit in making this assumption...

    ReplyDelete
  10. Qi ChinFebruary 2, 2009 at 11:30 AM

    While the character does mean "lost", in following with the phonetic theory, it's the simplest (by far) common character with the sound of die2. So the tattoo artist might just have been lazy.

    That, or he didn't even know (or care) about tones, and just took the simplest character with the general pronunciation of die. Seeing as how 爹 is not simple to somebody who doesn't know how Chinese characters work.

    ReplyDelete

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