This is a guest post from our very funny friend Jessica at Ugliest Tattoos.
Morning of salutations, Engrish Funny readers! Last week over at Ugliest Tattoos, we asked for pictures of foreign tattoos, hoping to uncover some reverse-Engrish. These tattoos were examined by our translator, the amazing Ellyn Henriksen, who discovered that some of them indeed seem to be the result of tying random words into Babelfish, while others are actually correct, if not the product of the best decision-making skills.
Below are some of our faves. Come visit us at Ugliest Tattoos for a few more.

These lovely wrists belong to Diana N., who really hopes that here tats read “dragon” and “tiger” as they were intended. Ellyn suggests that the next time you want animal tattoos, you look somewhere other than the placemat underneath your Chop Suey. While these are astrological signs that correlate with the animals, they would be read in Chinese as “first heavenly body” and “third heavenly body.” Just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
Next time, Diana, head down to Blockbuster and pick up the original version of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, because the characters they used there are correct (虎 [hu] for tiger and 龙 [long] for dragon).

This tattoo comes to us from Hella, who is such a bad girl that she went and got “Bad Girl” inked onto the back of her neck. Congrats Hella, because this tattoo is correct. The only thing bad about it is the handwriting.
Personally, if I had an awesome name like Hella, I’d be getting that tattooed onto the back of my neck.

This comes to us from Kris G., who is not the owner of the tattoo, but tells us that its crazy-in-lover bearer believes it says “promise.” Unfortunately, it’s actually a rarely used word that means something closer to “binding contract.” Romantic!
Thanks to Ellyn, to everyone who sent us pictures, and to Engrish Funny for having me as a guest! You guys are the optimum greatness!
Check out the other reverse-Engrish tattoos at Ugliest Tattoos!
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Copy & paste this:
I would love to take a photo of my coworker’s “Japanese” tattoo – she had her name done. At least, she asked for her name in Japanese – what she got is just two kanji pronounced like her name – Erin. The kanji are “picture” (絵) and “bell” (鐘).
Irony: that’s exactly how early Japanese writers adapted the Chinese characters they “borrowed” to write out Japanese.
As usual, the most recent EngrishFunny’s attempt at making fun of asian tattoos falls utterly flat, just like the last one did.
Not making fun of Asian tattoos, but of people who don’t bother to find out what they are getting, or assume it means something it doesn’t. It could be any language and still a fail.
that tattoo is a fail!
That tattoo is fail and funny!
Which is exactly how a lot of names are transliterated in to Japanese, unless your name actually has a meaning that you can translate and use, e.g. Lucy, which means “light”, can be translated to “hikari”.
Not in Japanese, any foreigner word or name in Japanese should be written in Katakana with the closest possible solution, kanji would never be used, unless, like you said, you can translate the whole name like Lucy to Hikari, but that’s is rare and also not an exact science.
EX : Lucy = Rushi = ルシ
Mark = Maaku = マアク
Alex = Arekusu = アレクス
Maaku (Mark) would actually be マーク. Long vowels are represented by bars in katakana.
I lived in Japan a while, many foreigners keep their katakana, but some find kanji that sound like their names to use, and its very acceptable, as many japanese names themselves dont have any meaning.
I didn’t because its impossible to get any japanese words that sound like the name John.
Erin means Ireland, and could have been translated!
Actually the most (perhaps all) names have a meaning…
yeah, mine means ‘horny’. Which means I am forced to visit england under an alias, but that’s ok, I can come up with at least two.
失敗!
負
对阿！
This feature didn’t quite work out, did it?
One person who has zodiac signs tattooed on them – who could possibly want that? Oh wait, that’s exactly the kind of thing people have tattoos of.
One person whose tattoo is… perfectly correct! Man, this stuff is killing me.
Finally we have the “promise” dude, who ended up with “binding contract” instead, which means pretty much the same thing.
Ah well.
What is the point you’re trying to make? you’re jsut randomly going to repeat stuff that article said? Oh you’re so edgy!
I think he’s pointing out how utterly fail this episode of Engrish Funny (?) was.
Your lovely (?) is not as straight as you might think.
My sentiments exactly, though you worded it much better.
I love the “handwriting” on my chinese tattoo…
失敗!!!
for Kris G., “諾” would fit your wish a lot better…
what? u say it’s too late? hmm…
The tattoo doesn’t belong to ‘Kris’ dumbass, you’d know that if you could read.
许诺 or 誓言 would work better.
stop COPY & PASTE from translators
YOU dumbass
Totally wish I had seen this in time to submit mine. I have a Kanji tattoo on my neck from a night of drunken debauchery and unfortunately I’m not 100% sure of its meaning
Believe it or not I just saw Charlie Sheen logged on at RichDater.
Shut up!!!!!!!!1
I recently saw a tuner who had a custom paint job on his car which featured very prominent kanji. I don’t know what he thought it said (probably “super great racer” or some other ego boosting statement) but what he got was, “A fool owns this car” How appropriate.
My husband used to work as a safety officer in a hospital in Vancouver, BC. A nurse he knew got a kanji tattoo that she said meant ‘beauty’ or some such thing.
He looked at her and said, “Actually… that means ‘biohazard’.”
“WHAT?! It does not!!”
“No, really. We had to take a course on hazardous material warnings in other languages and that’s the Japanese symbol for ‘biohazard’.”
Poor thing was devastated until my hubby finally let on that he was completely bs-ing her.
I like your husband…
It’s most encouraging to see that the whole language-ish concept goes both ways.
Get a life. Oh, the irony of me posting that…
Chingo? I thought it was chinpo or chinchin…
looky here has it written as ookina chinGO…should be chinKO
@Queen V: It seems obvious to me that Junkyard’s point is that while this “feature” was mainly supposed to be about these tats meaning something other than what the recipients thought they meant, with ostensibly hilarious results– and yet the 3 “favorites” provided as examples turn out to be rather un-hilarious in all 3 cases, totally correct in one case, and pretty darn close to the intended meaning in the other case. You may disagree, but it seems clear that Junkyard was calling this a premise/humor fail.
Actually, I think it was more of an ad for the tat site, trying to capitalize on an imagined or manufactured tie-in. It wasn’t a great offering here, and probably not there, either, but I wouldn’t rank it a FAIL. Maybe a C-minus – blah, h-hum, but not entirely horrible.
The main purpose of the tat site is to highlight tattoos that are ugly, in bad taste, or just cheesy, so while the point may not fit in perfectly at Engrish Funny (like the middle tattoo being correct), it would’ve been important for Ugliest Tattoos to point it out because, well, it’s really ugly. Really.
Also the two other tats are “close enough”, sure, but it’s emphasizing another Ugliest Tattoos point — that people should actually do a bit of research before tattooing something on their body, which just makes them look careless.
If you walk around the pathway by the beach at Eilat (the ‘Tayelet’), you can see tonnes of booths offering Chinese character tattoos. It’s kinda funny they’re all upside-down or left-to-right…
Oh, and by the way, ‘dragon’ should be 龍. That’s the pretty traditional character. The simplified ones make you look simple and uneducated to the common Chinese.
I have the Japanese character for “strange”. I felt it was a most apt description of me. Unfortunately it is the same one that Britney Spears has (if you want to see what it looks like. Apparently she thought it meant “mysterious”)
I hate to tell you this, but “strange” and “mysterious” are synonyms. Like, I mean, in English.
May be in English, but not necessarily in another language.
I think that if you get a tat in a language you don’t know and are relying on the artist to translate, You deserve to fall prey to his whimsy. Than you have a constant reminder that research is paramount. Oh and p.s., your Dragon & Tiger symbols are reversed. If that was on purpose, kudos, I love it.
How dare these chinese ppl make fun of westerners for being bad at chinese! It’s waaaaacist!
So how do you call those westerners who make fun of Chinese people for being bad at English? Engrish?
The romanticism around asian character tattoos seems to come from the need to be mysterious, graceful, and educated. It’s mysterious because only “you” know the “meaning.” Of course, this doesn’t work out because most people don’t really know a lot about the language or the characters, so they think they have a really meaningful tat. I think the important thing in that case is what the tat means to YOU/the owner, not its literal translation. Graceful because the characters are often beautiful aesthetically. And educated because, before the frenzy of getting these characters tattooed, it might have been a very cultured and educated thing to do, if the client actually knew about the character they were getting. I think the asian tats would be appropriate if the person truly appreciated the culture the symbol came from and understood its meaning, beyond looking it up on google (knowing where it comes from, how it is used by people in that culture, etc.) Otherwise, for people who just want the romantic idea of having some pretty symbol that is very meaningful to him/her and mysterious to others, you might as well concoct your own symbol or choose something that has been meaningful to you for a long time, instead of just borrowing something from someone else’s culture and pretending it means what you want it to. That’s all.
WORD!
Do something special. Picture your best feeling and get it on your skin. Thats so much better than copy and paste from *Place Culture/Language here*.
i like the binding contract one rather a lot. i used those exact words in my wedding vows…. better than a promise if you ask me. especially because it actually is a binding legal contract
EIRINN means Ireland. Not Erin. The two words are completely different. D:
Eirinn is an Erse (Irish Gaelic) word: Erin is a poetic word. In context, they both mean ireland.
I love tying random words into Babelfish.
so do I! i used to send things like: “Do you like waffles? Yeah we like waffles!” “A duck walked up to a lemonade stand” “Sonic screwdriver” “Have you seen a blowfish driving a sports car?” and “String rules!” and send them to my chinese friends until once I wrote in “I like traffic lights” and one of my friends pointed out to me that it somehow roughly translated to “I like gay men”
So random Torchwood/Doctor Who reference? lol.
I would like to see that.
“Ireland” in Japanese would be “アイルランド” = “Airurando”, so that definitely isn’t what she got.
This reminds me of the one time I was with a friend who was getting a tattoo, while flipping through one of the portfolios in the shop there was a picture of a girl who supposedly had “Love. Laugh. Life” written on her back in Japanese… unfortunately whoever did it just changed the font on their computer to Japanese and typed out the alphabet, so it came out as “フマヨナ。フチユムネ。フノニナ。” which is definitely not what she was going for.
I wish artists would do research before they’re like “Oh yeah, I can permanently etch Japanese into your back.”
It’s not the tattoo artist’s job to do research on your ink. I mean what fun would it be if they had to turn away all of the douchebags that want something really, really stupid permanently inked onto their body because it’s not “morally right” to tattoo them with stupidity? The artists would never make any money!
really? seriously? tattooing isn’t like hawking sunglasses at the mall. if you tell that vapid soulless zombie lookalike that the huge sunglasses that are currently taking up 99% of her face look really super hawt, oh well. just one more poptart wannabe running around looking like an even bigger ass. tattooing bullsh*t on people’s skin is not just irresponsible as a person, it’s terrible for your business. tattooist aren’t like they were 100 years ago, just some shady guy in the back of a shop, smoking and slinging ink. today they’re artists, many of them with art degrees and years of apprenticeship to their name. they work hard establishing their name and reputation, so throwing random designs on people that can reflect badly on them as the artist isn’t something they want to do. i know quite a few guys who won’t touch kanji, etc at all. it’s just too hard to know if it’s really correct and they’re not willing to put a mistake on someone for life. a good tattoo artist won’t put money over reputation. their reputation is all they have, it puts the food on the table. lose your reputation and you might as well be just some guy slinging ink in the basement of a crack house.
A workmate once got a load of chinese/japanese scrawled up his arm, and wouldn’t tell what it meant, so I spread it around that it was his order at the takeaway, for when he was too drunk to speak. Knowing him, it probably was…
You spelled your name wrong, sayanara, it should be さよなら, sayonara.
… this just goes to show you, you can’t mention complicated languages without a resulting string of boasts of mastery of the language.
no kidding, and most of these “masters” learned the language through kingdom hearts, anime or their online “girlfriends” abroad. i went to the defense language institute AND studied at Korea University while working as a linguist and i STILL know how far i am from being bilingual. let’s stop tooting our own horns and tearing each other down, huh? maturity, children. go ahead, call me a hypocrite. at least i have credentials to back up my horn tooting.
http://www.hanzismatter.com/
I really want to have a bunch of t-shirts printed up with “stupid white person” in chinese so that i can sell them.
This is my name in Japanese:
アマンダ
Reminds me of the girl who wanted a tattoo and patronized a Chinese restaurant by the name of Jade Gate in San Francisco.
There were cool Chinese characters under the name on the menu, which she thought were the Chinese translation, so she swiped the menu and had those characters tattooed over her mons.
It was months later, when she finally found out that what she had tattooed over her “Jade Gate” actually meant “Cheap and Tasty”.
Poetic justice, I say.
Hey you guys have to know that a signle Chinese word can have many meanings.
If you are looking for a particular meaning, you have to choose a vocabulary, which is usually combined with two or more Chinese characters.
e.g. 敗 has the meaning of lose, to be defeated, to ruin and to damage, but 失敗 means fail >^