Japan Tattoo NEED HELP
 

Hello!

I gotta know if this is my right choose of signs (kanji) :S


Dad


Honesty


friendly band (or connection, know what i mean?)


I'm happy about every help i get! they called me stupid in other forums, and im sick of it... thats really my wish to get this on my back as tattoo.

so, sorry for my bad english, and thanks for help :P

Dennis :ywave:

I am Chinese and an advanced Japanese learner. All your meanings are correct.

But I need to tell you that the third word 絆 is rarely used in Chinese. So if you want your tattoos to be understood by Japanese as well as Chinese, I personally recommend 友情(friendship) as an alternative.

alright thanks!
or how japans used to say, "arigato" :P

ok i just need 3 signs, but thats not why i choosed "band, connection" instead of friendship. i just want to say with that sign that u'll learn many things of wether good oder bad bonds... and "connection" is the thing u'll learn most of in life. do u know what i mean?

so can i take that?

In the other forums, did they tell you Kanji tattoos are one of the most cliche and contrived type of ink you can receive, only surpassed by tribals and barbwire armbands, but tied with stars and music notes? What jerks.

What are you hoping this tattoo will say? I am not fully understanding your explanation, but what I do understand doesn't seem to be coming through with these characters.

I think he's just getting random characters that he likes the meaning of, like what most people who get them do.

父

English meanings
father;

誠

English meanings
admonish;
fidelity;
prohibit;
sincerity;
truth;
warn;

絆

English meanings
bonds;
fetters;

So it might be read "Father warns about bonding" or "Father prohibits bonding".

In other words, gibberish.

Like I said, I'm sure the kanji he wants are supposed to be stand-alone when read. So when someone asks him about them, he can tell the person what each individual kanji means, instead of a sentence like your example.

Even then it's a -weird- combination. There's no obvious link between the words like with a lot of triptych tattoos. Maybe there's some great profound reason the OP hasn't shared, but ehhhh... taken at face value (which is what tattoos generally are), that's pretty wtf. I mean imagine seeing someone with;

Daddy
Truth
Fetters

doodled on them in English. First thing that would jump to my mind is that the person probably ~really~ hates their dad. Just because it's in another language and most people can't read it, doesn't make it any less bonkers. I mean, if that's what you really want OP, by all means go for it, but you'll have to accept that anyone who knows their kanji is probably going to think (at best) that you got suckered by some rogue tattoo artist.

It's funny how a lot of people these days think tattoos are made so that OTHERS can appreciate them!

People, not everyone is shallow enough to get a tattoo to look cool to others!

I have a friend that has the ugliest tattoo you've ever seen, but he LOOOOOOVES it because it means something to him that only he knows!

hm... alright thanks for ur answers.

i got prepared to have it discussed and ur pretty right.. but i also like the meaning of the sentence, my dad teached me to trust my opinion and go my own way.. anyway i like the kanjis and i want it as tattoo

Unfortunately these characters do not mean that sentence. It could be read much the opposite, actually.


I didn't shoulder tap him to tell him what to put on his tattoo. Remember who came to who to ask for advice.

You see, there are these things we call "outliers." Just as you can say, not everyone is out to impress others, I can say that not everyone gets tattoos for themselves. Living in a city, you can believe I know many people with tattoos. But you can't tell me a tattoo of Tinkerbell(which I've witnessed), or tribal tattoo, or barbwire, can mean something to someone.
I'm glad your friend likes his tattoo. It's just unfortunate he ruined the human form with something unapealing for the sake of charishing something only he knows.

I don't see it as weird when you've put it in the context I've put it in. I mean, if someone said "hey, what do those mean," he can do something like:
A) This one means father, because of...fill in the blank
B)This one means truth, because...fill in the blank
C) This one means bond/connection...fill in the blank

Most people don't do this in English because they're looking at the kanji as almost like a theme. I know a girl with a single kanji on her wrist that says "strength." IMO, it's a lot easier to describe to people that each kanji is a piece, rather than an Engrish sentence tattooed on you. This is obviously directed towards a western audience.

I have a feeling this is your first tattoo isn't it ? :mtongue:

If you're worried about the meaning, maybe you could ask one of the members here to translate the meaning into Japanese for you, rather than you going out and finding random kanji and putting them together. I'm sure someone would glady step up to help ;)

Didn't I do that?

Of course what you're saying works if no one can read it and 90% of the time no one will, but the fact of the matter is that there are people who CAN read kanji and they'll see the kanji as being linked. Especially if their grouped together in one area, like the OP has insinuated he plans to do. If he had one character on one arm, one on the other and one on his leg, sure, you'd assume their separate from each other but if someone wrote all three vertically, you're going to read that as linked. And the three words suggested don't have a group semantic like 和愛美 style triptych tattoos have. That's why it looks bizarre. That's why I said picture it as seeing 'dad truth fetters'. That's not a sentence either. You could equally say,
I got 'Dad' because of...
I got 'Truth' because of...
Doesn't make the overall picture any less aesthetically weird.
And if the OP wants to express a "My dad taught me to express myself and go my own way" sentiment or a "me and my dad are close" sentiment, then these aren't the right characters. OP asked the board to check his character choices. Note, no one's judged what he wants, or that he's chosen to do so in a language he clearly doesn't understand, which is a BIG rarity on JF. All I've pointed out is that the group of characters doesn't look right as a whole, which should honestly matter just as much as the individual characters themselves. I mean, see it like this;
"I want a kanji tattoo with the characters for 猪 because I'm part native american and it's my totem animal, and 愛 because i have a japanese girlfriend and it's the first character in her name." Great, perfect character choices; just don't put them together, because that seems like you mean "Boar love", which makes the original intention redundant and is unflattering.

There's a difference between asking for advice and asking for help! I don't see the OP asking what people think of his idea for a tattoo, all I see is help confirming the meaning of separate characters.

thanks, but i gotta say im happy to read some opinions of others.. what they think about my choice and so on.

i dont want a sentence that much, just dad, honesty & bond. vnow i got it, thanks ;)

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.