Deer

Reader Dimitri emails:

"Hello Tian, I am a long time reader of your blog. Last week while visiting the city of Val-d'Or (Quebec) in Canada, I found the following plastic leg 'tattooed' in the front window of a tattoo parlor. In this picture, you can clearly see the character is upside down. Could it be they wanted to make sure the tattooed person will be able to read his own tattoo?"

The character shown on the leg is an upside down 鹿, which means "deer" in Chinese.

In Japanese, when it is combined with 馬 (horse); as in 馬鹿, it means "fool, idiot", and 馬鹿外人 means "stupid foreigner[s]".