Read this before you are going to tattooo Chinese characters on your body!!

This is interesting. I read an article yesterday, it's about westerner like to tattoo Chinese character on their body, but most of them even don't know what's the meaning, then, interesting things just happen again and again. However, tattoo is not just a paint on your body, but a mark difficult to remove on the skin, understand the Chinese character you are going to tattoo is a very important homework you should do first, after all, it can't be wash by water.

I have watch a TV advertisement, the advertisement was about extractor fan, it's a common kitchen appliance in Asia, it usually need a net to catch the oil and avoid the oil would drop from the fan. The company guarantee their customer will provide the new net for their customer. Anyway, the idea came from a western young man want to tattoo something on his back to show his girl friend how much that he loves her. The tattooist suggest him to tattoo Chinese characters on his arm. After the tattoo finish, he said to the young man, in Taiwan, it means promise forever, but it actually mean "buy xxx extractor fan, get the net for free". Well, although it just a TV adverisement, but I believe the things like this happen all the time, no matter westerner want to tattoo Chinese characters, or some asian want to tattoo English characters.

Not only misunderstanding about the Chinese character's meaning, the script also bother me... I mean, come on, if you want to tattoo Chinese characters on your body, don't you want it to looks like an art? Even it looks the same to you but at least it might impress people who could read Chinese. Here is a story. Many years ago, use ink to draw on the body as tattoo was very popular in Taiwan, Thailand, even Greece. I have been to Greece, there is an island names Myknos, at night, you could just walk around the lanes in the city center, just like night market. I met a guy whos doing the ink tattoo, of course, there are samples that you could choose to ink tattoo on your body. I was checking out the samples and laughed, because I saw the characters that I use to read, Chinese. Yes, it's Chinese, but I don't know how he got the characters, be honest, the scripts looks awful to me. It doesn't looks like art, but seems like someone try to "draw" the Chinese character and didn't do a good job.

I understand why so many westerners would like to tattoo Chinese characters, because it looks like art as I said before, also could tell want they try to show. But before tattoo it, you better make sure the meaning is what you really want, and try to get the suit script on your body. If you need a suggestion, maybe I could help you.