Tattoo what?
I’ve always been intrigued by the fashion for tattoos displaying Chinese characters, so much so that a couple of years ago I set up tattoo.weblogs.com. Though I never pursued the idea, my intention was that each post would comprise separate photographs of a tattoo and its owner with an accompanying text about why they’d chosen the particular Chinese character(s).
In the trendy inner-city area where I live there’s no shortage of pierced and tattooed men and women, so I still try to decipher the tattoos I see—though a necessarily brief glance and my imperfect knowledge ensure that I’m only occasionally successful. A month or so ago, when the weather was still warm, I noticed a young woman on the platform at Newtown station, with a single character inscribed on her tailbone. “Why on earth would she want the character for ‘water’—水—(in Japanese, sui/mizu), tattooed just above her bum?” I asked myself. Then she shifted her weight from one foot to another and I saw the top of the character that had been obscured by the hem of her T-shirt. It wasn’t “water”, it was “eternity”—永—(ei/naga•i).
Imagine my delight, then, when Victor sent me a JPEG of a newspaper clipping (dated Thursday, June 6, 2002) about a young Englishman, Lee Becks, who thought he’d been tattooed with the characters “Love, honor, and obey” but learned from a woman in a Chinese take-away shop that the tattoo actually said, “At the end of the day, this is an ugly boy.” When he went back to the tattoo shop to complain the next day, he found it had closed. Lee’s boss summed up his trusting employee’s predicament: “I don’t think Lee stands much of a chance with any attractive young Chinese lady he may meet.”
I can recognize the characters for “evening”—夕—(seki/yū) and “man”—男—(dan/otoko) but the character used in Japanese for “ugly”—醜—(shū/miniku•i) bears no resemblance to that in the tattoo.
There is, of course, a fair chance that the entire story—which looks as though it comes from an English tabloid—could be a beat-up. But it’s good for a laugh, particularly these alternative tattoo phrases, attributed to the “University of Cambridge Department of Oriental Studies”:
The middle character, 丑 (see if unicode works here, as well), is chou3 and is just the simplified equivalent of the character that you mention as meaning ugly in Japanese.
丑 originally also meant ugly (as well as a few other things), but more like "shameful" or "disgraceful." In Simplified, they just took used it to mean both.
Posted by John on 15 May 2003 (Comment Permalink)