Ink Stink

I had just turned 18. Old enough to go to war, old enough to vote, and should be old enough to drink, I told myself. Next best thing: a tattoo. I even had one in mind. This would be no Yin-Yang, or trendy Celtic knot. Chinese character, bitches. I was copying a barista at my suburban neighborhood’s bohemian outpost, Coffee Times. Hers meant “Peace.” Looked sweet, but ‘Peace’ was way too hippy. Mine would be much cooler. I don’t think I knew exactly what it would mean when I sat in the chair at Tattoo Charlie’s on Limestone. After flipping through their book of character templates, I found the perfect tat: “To Play Guitar”. RAWK ON. A few months later I showed my freshly decorated shoulder to a young man at Wok-N-Go. “To kill,” he told me. “By way of bullet.” I was stunned, but kind of exhilerated. Over the years I’ve shown it to others that speak and read Chinese and heard variations of the “kill” theme. I lucked out and got something even cooler than what I originally wanted. But it turns out many other suckers are getting inked-up with disasterously wrong characters, such as “Motherly Beast Blessing” and “Healthy Woman Roof.” Britney Spears allegedly got one to mean “mysterious” but instead got inked with “strange.” Ouch. It’s become such a problem that a blog, Hanzi Smatter, is even dedicated “to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture.”

April 2nd, 2006