I was once at a convenience store, run by a Chinese man, and this 30ish girl in a tank top, obviously a regular comes in and says @look I got my sons name tattooed. Then she says, “look, Aitor@“. The guysmiles nervously. She leaves, and I ask the guy, who es shaking his head, and he says that it was some random mataré sign.

You know it's some ancient post because it had awards.

Unfortunately, it's been dead for a couple of years now, but this blog used to translate everyone's Asian-language tattoos.

A significant number of them use characters that are not from any language at all.

Quite a few that do have meanings are pretty funny, sometimes are quite ironic too.

https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/

Edit: I forgot about this, but it's still on the front page of that blog and I laughed all over again.

I know someone who has something tattooed on him: in Thai.

As in, it's a phrase which says 'in Thai' in Thai. So when people ask him, what is that? He says 'it's in Thai'. They say yes, but what is it? 'It's 'in Thai''. Yes, but...

You get the idea.

In Wales road signs are printed in both English and Welsh. When a new sign was being made someone sent the English part to a translator, who's out of office message was in Welsh. They assumed that message was the translation and printed it on the sign.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mistranslated-welsh-traffic-sign/

Not a translation error but the worst tattoo I ever saw on someone was a guy with a bloody tampon tramp stamp.

I knew a guy who had "bad to the bone" written on his neck in Chinese. The problem is, the phrase doesn't translate at all.

So, his tattoo read as "my bones are bad"

Tbf, he was a clown and had something like that coming.

I was in line behind someone who had 安 on her nape. I'm guessing she was going for a meaning of like peaceful or restful or something along those lines but you need a compound like 安心 or 安静 for that.

The character alone means more like cheap, at least in Japanese. Maybe it's different in Chinese.

I was thinking of getting 何か日本語で "nanika nihongo de" and if someone would ask me what it meant I’d say "something in Japanese"

Not the first time I've Lemmied this story, and it's not a tattoo it's a motorcycle decal. Kid turns up on a Kawasaki forum to show off his Ninja's paint scheme, and on the front cowling are five kanji figures, the first and the third were identical. Someone asked "Why does your bike say 'pig dog pig bird horse?'" He says "Nah man, it says N-I-N-J-A. That's how you spell 'Ninja' in Japanese."

In high school there was a Chinese girl who hung out with us. We were at at an arcade after school one day, and this guy comes up to her. She's 16. He's 40. He says something like "Hey baby, check this out!"

He takes off his shirt to reveal a not at all impressive body. But his chest had something tattood on it in Chinese.

She goes wide eyed, and runs off. When we caught up to her (obviously without the guy) she's having trouble breathing, because she's giggling so hard. Just try to visualize that. It's not a belly laugh, it's a giggle, but she's giggling so hard she's wheezing.

Now she spoke full perfect english, and only had a slight barely noticable accient. But when we asked her what was so funny, she went full stereotype Chinese voice from how amused she was at the tattoo.

"His chest.....it say ASSHOOOOEEEE!!!" (She was saying asshole, but I typed it phonetically how she said it, and with the enthusiasm she said it).

She just burried her face in her hands, and had the biggest giggle fit I've ever seen. She later said "He must have been an asshole to the tattoo artist. He'll never know!"

I never tattooed it on myself, or anyone else, but I used to work at a local greasy spoon, and knew a Professor of English that came in regularly, who was originally from China. I asked him for the name specific characters that phonetically made up the syllables of my and my girlfriend's names, he went to wait for his food, and came back with the characters he thought would work best. I used those to burn the characters into the weed stash box that she and I had made.

We told everyone that asked that we had no clue what it actually meant, it just sounded like our names.

Hentai Gaijin

Also reminds me of this story of a guy who wanted to have his name tattooed in Japanese. His name is Gary. And in Japanese it’s written in Katakana like this ゲリ but Gary didn’t think that looked cool and wanted to have it written in Kanji. So the artist gave him a tattoo of 下痢 which is pronounced as geri. Which actually means diarrhea.

Not sure if it’s true but would be funny as hell if it was.

I remember seeing a FB post ages ago, of some dude saying that he went to Japan to tattoo "God is faithful" in Japanese because he didn't trust local tattooists to write it right. The post was a photo of the tattoo on the dude's arm.

Someone pointed that it said something along the lines of "idiot stranger".

Mr "I went to Japan" complained that was impossible, because he went to Japan.

The other person posted a screenshot of the kanji on google translate and lo, "idiot stranger"