Saturday, April 21, 2012

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.

4 comments:

  1. 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.
    I 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.

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  2. 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

    The 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.

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  3. 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.

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  4. I 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...

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