Sacred Hearts and Hilarious Flash

Okay, so this guy came in with a friend of his. The friend asked me the standard "how much" question and showed me something, and I quoted him a price thinking he wanted it a LOT bigger than he was thinking, so I told him $300...he decided to go ask someone else (which was understandable after I realized how big he wanted it), but his friend decided to ask me how much for this sacred heart flash he brought in. It was terrible. I'll admit, it wasn't as bad as the guy that came in with something off badtattoos.com (no fuckin joke), but it was pretty bad. The only reason I could tell it was a sacred heart was because of the flames and thorns. So, I told him $200, if I could redraw it.



Now to the guy that came in earlier. I felt sorry for my coworker, Rob, when he had to deal with this. Seriously, why would you go to a website called BADTATTOOS.com, and decide, 'Oh, I want that tattoo'? I mean, seriously? Whut? Rob had to redraw it, and make it not suck. He did it, I give him props, but dame, that mustve given him some kinda headache.

Moogle Riding a Chocobo Tattoo!

This was the girl's first tattoo. I had wanted to tattoo a chocobo or a moogle for a long time, so when she came in wanting both.....yeah, I was pretty stoked. She didn't want the more "realistic" version of the chocobo, nor did she want the seriously cartoony one from Chocobo's Dungeon, so I drew up something in the middle for her. I love drawing chocobos, but for some reason I had never drawn a moogle before. I'm pretty happy with the pose, and the way it all came out though. It was super fun to tattoo.

Also, the girl who had gotten the "No Music, No Life" tattoo on her foot came in to get somnething else done, so I grabbed a healed picture. Turned out pretty solid for her being in basic training, and having to pretty much immediately put her tattoo destroying boots on.

Newschool Skully

My computer is being EXTREMELY slow right Now, (I'm here, it's on the parenthasis), so I'm just gunna drop this in here...



It's about a month or so old, on my co-worker, Rob.

from: Ben O.
to: Tian
date: Thu, Jan 1, 2009 at 8:32 PM
subject: Please tell me my friend's tattoo means "understand"

Hi Tian,

I hope you don't mind me asking, but my friend just got this tattoo and says it means "listen/understand". I've seen enough of Hanzi Smatter to cringe even before I know how bad it is. What's the verdict?

Regards,
Ben O.



We don't really want to beat up on this lovely lady and her cute tattoo too much, but the fact is that the character 承 by itself probably does not mean quite what she thinks it does.

First, we have to decide whether the tattoo is supposed to be in Chinese or Japanese.

If it is supposed to be Chinese, a single character is fine, but the Chinese meaning of the character is more like "to bear, to carry" or "to undertake" or "to receive." But none of these meanings is even close to the intended meaning of "listen/understand."

If it is supposed to be Japanese, the single character 承 does not have much meaning, but rather if it is supposed to be a verb, it must be written with two characters: 承る. Now this verb has various meanings and some of them are somewhat close to "listen" or "understand," but mostly the word is used as a very humble and polite way to agree with the other person in a conversation, so one might say 承ります when one means "I hear you" or "I understand your point." It is really nothing like "listen."

We guess this is the only way we could stretch the meaning of 承 to something like "hear" or "understand" but we don't think is really what they meant and even that is a stretch because the verb marker る is missing from 承る.

So unfortunately, this is a case of "close but no cigar."

Ben, give our best regards and sincere commiseration to the unfortunately tattooed friend.

from: Tomas
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Thu, Jan 1, 2009 at 1:08 PM
subject: hanzi smatter

Hello, Thought I should send this contribution to your (awesome) blog. Found it on a Swedish community site, the proud owner of the tattoo claims that it says "GUN" (a Swedish female given name, not the thing you use to shoot people). I'm not good enough at Chinese to figure it out, but it seems like complete nonsense to me...



Since I was busy converting my DVD collection for Argosy HV358T-00500 HDD media player, I let Alan to take a crack at it:

Hah! How on earth is 巨臼内 supposed to be GUN? Is there yet another bogus "Chinese alphabet" out there?

巨臼内 means more like "inside the giant mortar." (Here, the "mortar" 臼 is the thing you use together with a pestle to crush things like grain or medicine. It is not the weapon.)

The things that people decide to get tattooed onto their bodies never cease to amaze.