to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 8:08 AM
Hello,
Congrats for the cool blog.
A colleague has this tattoo done a couple of years ago and she was told it is suppose to mean “strength”.
Does it really mean that or anything else at all?
Thanks,
Amilcar C.
小畜 originated from the book of I Ching, meaning "small accumulating". Other variations include "the taming power of the small" and "small harvest". I don't see the connection between that and "strength", unless there is some kind of six degrees of
It almost looks like 懦 to me...
ReplyDeletelol, that would be unfortunate. 懦 couldn't be more opposite xD
ReplyDeleteIn Japanese it's "Small beast". The character 畜 stands for "beast" or "animal", mostly livestock. Do you knw the most common Japanese insult? It's 畜生 (Chikusho)
ReplyDeleteWhy are the two characters drawn so disproportionately? Maybe the artist thought they were one (lopsided) symbol?
ReplyDeleteLooking at the first character, it looks more like the radical 忄 rather than 小
ReplyDeleteThe tattoo might be a poorly written "小畜," but there is actually a compound character "慉" (pron: xu4), a rare word meaning "to support" or something like that.
ReplyDeleteBut in Japanese, 慉 has the On-reading "kyou," which it shares with the character 强, which in turn does in fact mean "strength."
But I have no clue how a tattooist who obviously doesn't know Japanese would have made a mistake based on On-readings.