from: Joey L.
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 3:22 PM
subject: Lost in translation
Can you please translate.
Not another “gibberish tattoo”!
Obviously it’s supposed to be JOEY from the handy-dandy cheat sheet to the bogus gibberish font.
I wonder how many people ended up saddled with gibberish font tattoos. Given how often they crop up on this site alone, I'd guess the number to be pretty high.
ReplyDeleteI have to say though, this is an especially poor one - the tattooist seems to have started by doing some particularly sloppy renditions of the gibberish font characters (I suspect working off of a copy of a copy of the font sheet), and then going so far as to simply make up (or copy someone else's invention of) a rather ridiculous looking character for the "y" that was missing from the font sheet. Ooof.
He didn't make it up. If you notice, in the "cheat sheet" page, there is a link to a place that sells a "design sheet" for this sorry font: http://www.naturalexpressions.org/Tattoo_Flash_CKE.html
ReplyDeleteThe design sheet is awful quality, but anyway, the "Y" is in there. I think it's not in the cheat sheet because it was hard to reconstruct it into something half-way printable.
Ah, I see. Looks like the tattooist didn't use that particular design sheet (the characters are deformed in different ways), but that sheet had a common origin with whatever they did use. Copies of copies of copies... of nonsense. It's weird that this is going on in tattooing, though - it's 2012 and they still seem to be using Nth generation photocopies of something they could have looked up on the internet.
ReplyDeleteI just don't know how you make sense of this horrific calligraphy. My Chinese is decent, and I can never read any of these garbage "characters." I laugh at 99.9% of the garbage Chinese "tattoos" I see. Nikki Minaj has a glaringly obvious bad one: 上帝 something or other intended to be profound...
ReplyDelete