Asian tattoos
Tattoos with Asian style are very popular for a long time. Asian tattoos hit western culture in 80s. Chinese dragons, Japanese carps and hieroglyphs are among the most popular Asian tattoo designs. Hippies, intellectuals, girls – everyone apply them. They help people to show their view on life with just a couple of symbols that will be on their skin for eternity.
Most of eastern culture admirers, however, do not bother themselves to realize the exsact meaning of Asian tattoo. This effect on the one hand is catastrophic and on the other very humorous for those people, who understand the meaning. There is even a blogger who devoted his live journal to such failures in Asian tattoos. He submits such failures there and explains their real meanings.
As the artists tell themselves every twentieth client asks for some Asian tattoo design consisting of hieroglyphs. And this is the way to catastrophe. As a rule such people do not consider Asian tattoos to be the art, but just follow the trend without thinking. If such a citizen comes to a bad artists the result may be unpredictable. The tattoo artists easily can turn the hieroglyph upside down and can add the line to the place it isn’t supposed to be or vice versa miss some lines.
In the best case such Asian tattoos represent just abbra-cadabra, sometimes even looking good, or bad translation of western words to Chinese language. But sometimes the choosing of the Asian tattoo design becomes a pure lottery. Fro example, some citizen wants to have a tattoo meaning "out of law" and it turns out to be "fugitive thief" or "squealer". Some think that their Asian tattoo means "don’t fear anything" but actually wear "undertaker" on them.
Girl who loves nature wants to write "tree" on herself, but gets pirate word instead. One brave woman wanted to see the word "bitch" on herself, but got "cheap whore" instead. The most vivid examples of the mistake is the hieroglyph is "the golden pig" (the pig turned upside down), that in this case means "I’m stupid/pregnant" or "my husband makes me sell myself".
If you still decide to get Asian tattoo representing hieroglyph must first of all take the advice and choose which exactly language they want – Chinese or Japanese. Actually China and Japan have a lot of common hieroglyphs by appearance but they do not necessarily mean the same thing. Especially, if the hieroglyph stands with another one, that can dramatically change the meaning of the first one.
After you choose the language, you have to choose what must be actually said on this language and therefore what will be depicted on your Asian tattoo design. By the way it’s better not to seek analogues in your own language because according to the peculiarities of translation you may get not the result you expect. When choosing Asian tattoo design depicting hieroglyph, you’d better chose the phrase on the original language. Japan and China have very rich culture and almost eternal list of proverbs suited for any case in life. For example the soccer superstar David Beckham has the Asian tattoo that says literally "The life and death are predetermined, the richness and glory are dependent on heavens". Such tattoo looks very good and as you can see has a correct and beautiful meaning.
So, according to abovementioned, the choice of Asian tattoo design can be very difficult. Even well-known artists can have some problems with determining the correct meaning of this and that tattoo. If you still want to get yourself one, you must be sure that you get the Asian tattoo design you are sure you know the meaning of.