30 People Who Can Read Japanese/Chinese Share The Most Idiotic Tattoos They’ve Ever Seen

Getting a tattoo is a serious decision: you want it to look great and to reflect your inner values. So it’s natural that you want your tattoo design to come out perfect. However, tattoos in foreign languages sometimes have a tendency to… backfire. Especially if they’re in Chinese or Japanese and you don’t happen to know either language!

When one internet user asked Redditors who speak the two languages what was the biggest translation fail they’ve seen tattooed on someone was, the floodgates opened. Scroll down for the best of the bad tattoos and get ready to giggle like a gaggle of geese. Remember to upvote the stupidest tattoos!

Bored Panda spoke to Japanese language expert and member of the VMU Japanese club Hashi Kotryna Kvietkauskaitė about foreign language tattoo ideas. Read on for our exclusive interview and some great advice to keep in mind if you ever plan to get a tattoo with Japanese or Chinese symbols!

We’re also pretty sure that you’ll want some more hilarious dumb tattoo stories after reading this list. So be sure to check out our earlier article about people who are fluent in Chinese or Japanese sharing tales of the worst tattoos they’ve seen.

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I (27F don't understand Chinese/Japanese) have the characters for "Strawberry" on my shoulder. Was at a gym changing and gal 1 who could read the language says "Oh! Strawberry! I love your tattoo". I explained why I had gotten the tattoo (long story involving strawberries) and gal 2 overheard our conversation. Gal 2 says "I have a tattoo that means "wisdom" and shows us; gal 1 says "... that says Turtle".

Edit: here is the story behind the tattoo! My grandmother passed away of bone and lung cancer in 2010. I bought frozen strawberries a few weeks later to make smoothies in the morning, and the smell of those frozen strawberries transported me back to my childhood when I would eat frozen strawberries from her freezer. She used to pick SO many and make jam etc etc but I would pick strawberries to snack on instead of ice cream.

After she had passed I decided to get a tattoo, and was thinking of a strawberry with ice crystals around it or something. I went for (American) Chinese food with friends and was telling them about my tattoo idea. When it came time to break our cookies and read our fortunes mine read "to remember is to understand" which I thought was cool, had been remembering and thinking of my grandmother over the last month or so since she had passed. When I turned over the fortune, the "chinese word" was strawberry.

I've never seen 6 people turn white so quickly.

I decided to get the chinese symbols for strawberry that day, and I still have the fortune in a special box at home.

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30 People Who Can Read Japanese/Chinese Share The Most Idiotic Tattoos They’ve Ever Seen

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