"Real Melon Knows Men"?

The four characters can be translated as following:



真 = true or real

瓜 = melon

智 = wisdom or intelligence

男 = man or male



I guess she wants everyone know that she got a smart melon on her shoulders and will not fooled by men. But not smart enough to realize the tattoo she got is complete gibbrish.

Ambiguous Hanzi Tattoo - Case Study 3

"Not a Strength Trap"? What the hell does that mean? Does he want everyone to know that his right arm is not as strong as the left one? Perhaps he was a victim of Poliomyelitis and did not get his vaccine in time when he was a child?



莫 = not, lack of

力 = force, strength, power

羅 = snare, trap

Ambiguous Hanzi Tattoo - Case Study 2

I am very curious about why people would randomly select three Chinese characters and tattoo them on.



Here is another example of poorly done tattoo. The top character does not even exist in Chinese characters, and it is completely made up to be look similar to Chinese. The second and third characters are fine, even though I am not impressed with the penmanship, but at least they are are correct and have meanings.



夢 = dream or wish

智 = knowledge or wisdom

Ambiguous Hanzi Tattoo - Case Study 1

I have been staring at these four characters for a while now. I don't know what the person wanted the tattoo to represent. The only way to interpret it is to go character by character:



子 = child, son, seed, offspring, egg, pellet, or bullet (depends on context).

手 = hand.

術 = proceed, method, or technique.

流 = flow, smooth, fluent, or drift (depends on context).



The closest definition I can come up with is: "smooth technique of hand to achieve seeds". It sounds like this dude enjoy "polish his own knob" a lot.



Regardless, the direction of the characters is reversed.

T-shirt found at Urban Outfitters 都市服裝

I saw this t-shirt for sale at Urban Outfitters (都市服裝）. The character 彩 in the Chinese caption is reversed. The phrase 好彩 is used to describe a good performance, and in Cantonese, it means "lucky".

好 = good
彩 = color or brilliant

This is a fantastic story published in UK's Metro newspaper about a boy with his badly done Chinese tattoo. He wanted the tattoo to say "Love, Honor, and Obey", instead he got "At the end of the day, this is an ugly boy".

Support from Sinosplice (华结）

John from Sinosplice(华 结 or traditional version: 華結) has emailed me this tattoo photo taken in Australia. The tattoo suppose to mean "Death before Dishonor"(寧死不受辱）, but all the characters go the wrong way.



I guess the tattoo bearer must to explain to everyone from now on why he "rather to be a coward than die honorably".



寧 (simplified version: 宁) = rather

死 = death (or "to die")

不 = no (or "not to")

受 = suffer (or "to experience")

辱 = disgrace (or "dishonor")