Well, what I'm saying is that in a western environment, you're acting as though everyone can read kanji. Checking the most current Census Beureau I could find for the United States (census.gov), the groups who identified themeselves as "Asian" or Hawaiian/Pacific Islander" only made up about 5% of a population of over 307,000,000 people. This group doesn't take into consideration Asians who may be second generation and can't read (or maybe even speak) their parents native tounge, or any other Asian races who don't use kanji.The ammount of "westerners" who can read kanji in the US probably wouldn't even equal half a percent. So your estimated "90%" would probably sit around 96-97% :mtongue:
***This is obviously written from US statistics, some variation may occur between nations and I recognize that.

Given those odds (all things equal), as a social experiment, I could probably get a kanji tattooed on my chest and not wear my shirt outside for a week, and no one would be able to tell me what it means.

The point is, when you yourself study kanji, and you probably surround yourself with those who share the same interests, the smallest things that have to do with your interests will stick out like stop signs, including tattoos that may not make sense grammatically, but have a different representation.

How many of these westerners know what the meaning of the tattoo they want before getting it (by having knowledge in the language)? They don't. They get the kanji or "symbol" as a whole, like it's own meaning. Then if they get another, it remains separate from the others. You can google "kanji tattoos" and you'll probably find a lot of tattoos you consider "botched," when not looked at for their grammatical correctness as a whole, they're just characters, and each one has an individual or specific meaning to the bearer.