Japanese tattoo

  Japanese Kanji Tattoos

Thinking about getting a Japanese Kanji Tattoo? These are definitely very popular items to get tattoo of. The beauty of the Japanese and Chinese calligraphic style of writing has a definite allure to many people. That coupled with the fact that the writing is foreign to most of us and therefore looks mysterious and magical. Therefore Japanese Kanji makes a great artistic item to get tattoos done of.

However you have to be careful. You see my wife is from Japan and is a classical trained calligrapher. I can’t tell you the number of times each week that we see someone with a beautiful looking tattoo that doesn’t make sense. You see for the tattoo artist in the local tattoo parlor if you pay the money and want the tattoo that is good enough for them. They get paid and Kanji tattoos are often pretty inexpensive and quick to get done from a tattooist stand point. So they don’t worry to much about the accuracy of the tattoo.

However these flash kanji tattoos that are hanging on the wall in most local tattoo parlors have been bought and copied and sold over and over again and a lot has been lost in the translation. Meaning these images are often missing strokes, or the strokes are done out of order, they are upside down, or just plain the wrong symbol and have a very different meaning. In fact there is even a wonderful blog website done by a Chinese American who people send pictures to and check the accuracy of the Kanji tattoo they had done. The problem is 90% of the time what they think that tattoo says and what it actually says or doesn’t say is often pretty different. There are even horrible stories about people getting things like the word diarrhea tattooed on themselves thinking it said something different.

These errors can happen for two reasons.

1. The difficulty of translating English Words into a foreign language. Often there is no exact translation and even an exact translation might not even make sense to a native speaker.

2. Tattoo artist lack the knowledge of the proper way to form the letters.

You see it takes the Japanese at least 12 years of school to learn to read and write properly. Not like in the US where most 2 and 3rd graders can read pretty fluently. In the Japanese language there are three different alphabets hiraganna, katakanna, and Kanji. Most tattoos are done in Kanji. However there are over 10,000 different symbols in Kanji and the order of strokes that it is written and each little tiny part of the kanji has meaning.

If Of course if you are not to concerned about what your tattoo says then it doesn’t really matter. Go ahead and just get it done at your local tattoo parlor. However if you are concerned about it being accurate then you should either post a job for a custom tattoo design or consult with someone who is a native speaker of the language.

About the author:
Chris has been running Design My Tattoos website for the last three months. He has thoroughly enjoyed helping people to get custom tattoo designs done by professional tattoo artists. Go ahead and check out the site and post a job to get your own custom tattoo design. If you are a tattoo artist and would like to earn some extra income go ahead and sign up as an artists and make some money in your spare time. You can read this article on Japanese Kanji Tattoos here and other articles by clicking here. We also have an extensive Celebrity tattoo galleries and design galleries on our site.



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