“To Commit Any Evil Imaginable”
Do you have a tattoo in Chinese or Japanese, even though you don’t speak a word of either language?
Because you thought, that shit looks COOL, and spiritual, and whatnot?
But deep down you wonder - why do people always laugh when they see my tattoo? Does it say what I think it says?
Have no fear!
Hanzi Smatter is an amazing blog whose host does the very excellent favor of providing translations of all the Chinese and Japanese calligraphy tattoos that silly Westerners got while drunk or after doing minimal research or trusting someone whose knowledge of Asian languages was either exaggerated or being used for evil… so they think their tattoo means some awesome sh*t like “Choice of a New Generation” but it really says “Pepsi Will Make Your Ancestors Return From the Dead.”
One guy thought his tattoo said “Fear No Man,” only to be told:
棺材佬 means “coffin man”.
Another person admitted that they had “absolutely no idea what it means”… turns out their tattoo says:
“to commit any imaginable evil”
And my personal favorite:
this gibberish means nothing in Japanese or at least nothing like “live for today” and I don’t think it means anything in Chinese either. The only meaning I can guess is that if it were written 生きて現れる, this would mean “to show up alive” or “turn up alive” as if someone thought dead had appeared alive. Anyway, it sounds pretty spooky, like seeing a zombie!
I think the person who made this up just looked in a dictionary for the word for “to live” 生 and a word that means something like “now” 現 and thought you could stick them together to make “live for today.”
It doesn’t work like that.
There’s a great one where that idiot Audrina from the Hills got a tattoo that was supposed to say “pork fried rice”….
However the tattooed phrase is not grammatically correct. What has been tattooed is direct translation from English word-per-word to Chinese of “pork; oil fried; rice grain”
On the plus side, this blogger seems to be pretty non-judgmental. They often say things like “better luck next time.” So there’s that.
) Your Reply...