For tattoo Removal
L.A.
Cool Tat, Too Bad It's Gibberish
By CINDY CHANG
Published: April 2, 2006
LOS ANGELES
SHAD MAGNESS wanted to celebrate the love he felt for his young son with a grand
gesture.
At a Los Angeles tattoo parlor four years ago, he had two Chinese characters
etched in a prominent spot on his left forearm. He assumed that the translation
in the sample book the tattoo artist showed him — "one love" — was correct.
The first sign of trouble came six months later, when Mr. Magness was shopping
at a Staples store and the checkout clerk informed him that the characters on
his arm meant not "one love" but "love hurts."
Jamie Rector for The New York Times
Shad Magness thought his tattoo meant "one love."
Six months after he got it, he found out that it means "love hurts."
Mr. Magness consulted some bilingual co-workers, who confirmed the bad news: his
tattoo did indeed trumpet the pain of failed love.
"I've been kind of embarrassed about it ever since," said Mr. Magness, 31, a
real estate appraiser in Orange, Calif. "I guess that's what you get for not
being able to read it."
Mr. Magness is now undergoing a series of time-consuming treatments to remove
the tattoo, which appropriately enough to the sometimes ouch-inspiring procedure
can also mean "loves the pain."
Christina Norton of Redondo Beach, Calif., is also getting her tattoo lasered
off.
At the tattoo parlor, "I asked the guy, 'Are you sure?' " Ms. Norton recalled.
"He assured me, so then I went ahead and did it." Now she knows that her tattoo
is meaningless out of context with other characters. "Ever since I found out, I
was like, I have to get it off," she said.
James Morel, the chief executive officer of Dr. Tattoff, tattoo removal
specialists in Beverly Hills, Calif., says his clinics sign up five or six new
patients a week who, like Mr. Magness and Ms. Norton, have discovered that their
Chinese tattoos mean something drastically different from what they intended.
The Chinese character tattoos, which have been popular for more than a decade,
are as commonly spotted on college students from the heartland as they are on
baristas in Berkeley.
Sports Illustrated recently featured a spread on N.B.A. players' Chinese
tattoos, quoting the Chicago Bulls center Tyson Chandler as saying he checked
with Yao Ming of the Houston Rockets before getting a tattoo meaning "love."
Britney Spears was apparently not so cautious. She reportedly got a tattoo she
thought said "mysterious" but actually meant "strange."
At the root of the craze for Chinese tattoos is the same fascination for Eastern
traditions that has fanned interest in feng shui and Asian-theme clothing and
décor. But by imprinting the Chinese characters indelibly into their skin, the
owners of the tattoos take their Asian fetish, and the consequences of
less-than-perfect knowledge, to a different level.
Because they must rely on the word of others to ascertain the meaning of the
characters, they are vulnerable to honest mistakes as well as malicious
jokesters.
Tattoo artists — few of whom know Chinese — copy the characters from templates
that are often of uncertain provenance and are easily corrupted if a word is
unwittingly substituted, or if someone decides to take liberties by altering a
few strokes. When two characters are combined to form what is in English a
catchy phrase, context can be lost and the result can be hilarious — or worse.
"Everybody here that does tattoos, we understand that if you combine the
characters together, they have a different meaning," said Ricky Sturdivant, a
tattoo artist in Normal, Ill. "We try to express that to the customers, but
sometimes they want us to do it anyway."
Errors are common enough to be good business for tattoo removal specialists, and
to fuel a blog, www.hanzismatter.com, which posts photographs of botched tattoos
accompanied by sardonic commentary from Tian Tang, a Chinese-born engineering
student.
The blog takes the name Hanzi Smatter from the Chinese term for the ideograms
that are composed of as many as 30 strokes and take years of practice to write
fluently. Hanzi are also used extensively in Japan, where they are referred to
as kanji, and to a lesser degree in South Korea.
Mr. Tang finds plenty of fodder on Web sites like Body Modification Ezine,
www.bmezine.com, where entire photo galleries are devoted to hanzi-kanji
tattoos. Some of Hanzi Smatter's 2,500 daily visitors e-mail him about tattoos
they are thinking of getting or to verify the meaning of tattoos they already
have, which sometimes puts him in the awkward position of having to deliver bad
tidings.
"I'm very surprised a lot of times that people will e-mail me about their
tattoos, and they never found out the real meaning before they got it," said Mr.
Tang, 29, a graduate student in materials engineering at Arizona State
University who moved to the United States when he was 13. "Some of them are
close, but some are just way off."
One elaborate tattoo posted shortly after his blog's inception in late 2004
means "power piglet," according to Mr. Tang's translation. Another, on a woman's
lower back, says "motherly beast blessing."
Marquis Daniels, of the Dallas Mavericks, thought he was getting his initials in
Chinese characters but what his arm actually says is "healthy woman roof," Mr.
Tang said. Similarly, Shawn Marion of the Phoenix Suns was under the impression
that his nickname, "the Matrix," was tattooed on his leg, but Mr. Tang says the
inscription translates as something like "demon bird moth balls."
Some hanzi tattoos, Mr. Tang explains on his blog, are nothing but gibberish. A
few appear to have been copied backward. And to a Chinese or Japanese person's
eyes, the calligraphy is almost always atrocious.
Hanzi-kanji tattoos became trendy in the late 1980's or early 1990's, tattoo
experts say. They were a niche taste as far back as the early 20th century, when
globetrotting sailors would dock in Asian ports and leave with a colorful
souvenir, according to C. W. Eldridge of Berkeley, a tattoo artist and tattoo
historian.
To Angela So, 27, a Canadian from Hong Kong who reads Hanzi Smatter regularly,
people who get Chinese tattoos without researching the meaning are trivializing
a language with a storied literary tradition and a written record going back
well before the birth of Jesus.
"A lot of Western people get tattoos, and even though it's for personal reasons,
they make everything so exotic," Ms. So said. "They do insult the culture. After
all, Chinese culture has been here for thousands of years."
Mr. Eldridge is among the tattoo artists who will not execute a hanzi unless the
client has verified the meaning with someone who knows the language, whether it
is a Chinese-speaking friend or the waiter at the neighborhood sushi restaurant.
Many also require a waiver absolving them of responsibility if a customer later
discovers an error.
"If you're going to mark your body in a permanent way, you have to do your
research," said Marisa DiMattia, a New York lawyer and the editor of the online
tattoo zine Needled, www.needled.com. "If someone has done their homework and
still wants to get the kanji, and they've made a mistake, don't expect the
tattooist to say, 'That's not what it means.' "
The same warning might be extended to the other side of the Pacific, where a
tattoo subculture is in full flower in Japan, and body art is just beginning to
catch on in China.
Mr. Tang of Hanzi Smatter is well aware that the sword of linguistic ignorance
can cut both ways. His blog was partly inspired by www.engrish.com, which
documents amusing English gaffes by Asians on T-shirts, street signs and product
packaging.
Horitaka, a tattoo artist in San Jose, Calif., who specializes in traditional
Japanese designs and travels often to Japan, said he recently spotted a tattoo
in a Japanese magazine that said, in English, "truth love" instead of "true
love."
"You'll see kanji here and there, but young people there are the same as young
people here," Horitaka said. "A lot of Americans want kanji because it's a
little exotic, whereas a lot of Japanese are getting Western writing."
