Chinese language is probably one of the most daunting languages for western people to learn, it is very rare for a tattoo artists to really understand Chinese. Also for that reason, a lot of people seems to be void of a reliable source for Chinese tattoo translation or verification. The reality is that we constantly see a lot of crappy Chinese tattoos, so what are common mistakes with Chinese tattoos?

Chinese writing system is completely different from Latin-letter based languages. There is no alphabet but only characters, So, the writing of Chinese is really difficult, let alone having them inked on your body. The most common mistakes we see with wrong composition can be found in oddly placed strokes, extra strokes, missing strokes, ill-shaped strokes, incorrect shapes etc.

I don’t understand it but I keep encountering Chinese tattoos in a mirrored form, which means it is written backwards on your body and it can only be normally displayed when you see in a mirror. It is similar to writing the English word “Hope” as “Epoh.”

OK, this is a really problem, even for Chinese people or Japanese people. As I have talked about in my previous articles, it is difficult to tell their differences. Chinese characters and Japanese kanji can share the same symbol but with different meanings. A symbol may exit in Chinese character but not in Japanese kanji, and vice versa. However, this is only between Chinese characters and Japanese kanji. Besides kanji, Japanese language also use two other scripts (hiragana, and katakana), which will never cause confusion with Chinese characters at all, at least for Chinese people.