Flutterby™! : Tacky Tats 2009-09-24 11:53:17.552814+00

Tacky Tats

2009-09-24 11:53:17.552814+00 by meuon 8 comments

Tacky Tattoo Photo Gallery - There are like watching train wrecks. I like Tattoo's, admired many (including Eric's eye), but never seen something I'd want on my body for the rest of time. After the recent conversations about post-modernism high-brow intellectual conversations, this will bring our collective Flutterby IQ back below 200. And yes, I actually like a couple of these as well. But I don't want them on my body.

The spelling errors are a personal pet peeve of mine. I sometimes wonder if, for instance, when someone had "Beautiful tradgedy" written on their body if it was intentional, or if their ignorance will be apparent for the rest of their lives? One of my favorites is a man with a tattoo of the grim reaper on his back and the words "Your mine" written across the top. "You're" being a contraction of the words "You" and "are" would make sense there, but "Your" meaning "belonging to you" is what's actually written. I can't help but think "Your mine" is a tattoo somehow involving mineral rights.

I giggled at the Izod one, and I think next time I shave my head I'll have to break out the washable markers and do a big smiley face on the back of it...

And there's always Hanzi Smatter documenting the truly ignorant in tattoo recipients.

Oddly, I had a friend who got the Japanese words for "trust" "no" and "man" tattooed down her upper back. She came to a bar where I was working and showed it to me. A friend, who was a translator for two type of Chinese and some Japanese asked her what she thought it meant. He then explained that the three words together didn't make sense in Japanese, but loosely taken would imply that she was a lesbian. I couldn't imagine asking for words I don't understand to be tattooed on my body by someone else who didn't understand the words when it seems some american tattoo artists can't even spell their native words (tradgedy?), nor understand the difference between "your" and "you're"

I find it very ironic that your friend who wanted "trust no man" tattooed in Chinese on her back trusted the tattooist to tattoo that phrase on her back.

I think that if I was going to get some foreign character set tattooed on me I would have the phrase I wanted in that character set translated by a native speaker of the language, then go find another native speaker to translate it back to me without knowing what I was doing with it and then take it to the tattoo artist to have it tattooed on me. I might even ask a third person who was a native English speaker who was fluent in reading the foreign character set to tell me the meaning of it before committing to the tattoo.

I have yet another friend who was an Arabic translator for the Army. She was always accused of being a flirt, and after the army, she had "flirt" tattooed on her lower back written in Arabic. She speaks it fluently, knows all implications and such of the language personally and made sure the tattoo artist could draw the word by hand before she let him tattoo it on her. That's the only possible way I could even imagine having words put on my body. That being said, all my scars are involuntary, I have no tattoos and no notion on getting one. I've liked a lot of things in my life and not liked them 6 months later... I'm just not driven toward anything "permanent" and probably never will be.