Saturday, February 2, 2008

Like Father, Like Son

Over three years ago, my friend John Pasden sent me a tattoo photo he took of an Australian acquaintance. The tattoo was "Death before Dishonor" in Chinese, however the orientation of characters was reversed, therefore the youngman is proudly displaying "[I] rather to be a coward than die honorably" on his forearm.

A few days ago, I took a peek at BMEzine's tattoo gallery and saw this:


http://bmeink.com/A80127/high/npsp-henry.jpg

is a Chinese idiom which means "like father, like son". Once again, the orientation of characters are reversed & the phrase is now gibberish.

His father must be really proud of his idiot son.

4 comments:

  1. Another questionable Japanese tattoo can be found at BME this month. http://www.bmeink.com/A80127/high/noys-without-fear.jpg

    It reads, in actually quite a nice font, 不安のない, which according to the poster is supposed to mean "no fear," but is really more like "no uneasiness."

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  2. And I just realised the same poster has a tattoo on his other thigh, also in Japanese, reading no regrets http://www.bmeink.com/A80127/high/noyr-without-regret.jpg

    This time the meaning is correct, but one kanji is missing a stroke.

    Why do they do it??! Why??!!

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  3. Hello from Australia. A friend of my son anted a tattoo of the greek PI symbol. So he, being a reasonable artist, but not alas a scholar, drew it in outline on his arm and got it inked in by the tattooist

    Trouble was he did it using a mirror so the image was reversed. It took a few months of showing it off, with his no sleeves shirt, before a true geek was brave enough to point it out.

    It didn't matter much as it was only maths geeks who would have been laughing at him.

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  4. Greek pi symbol? well, as far as I know the symbol is the Greek equivalent of the letter P, with the capital: Π and the lower case: π (though the handwriting is a little different than this) writing in reverse would not matter that much unless that "reverse" means "upside-down"

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