You know, when someone has writing scrawled all over his/her arm, back, butt, where ever, they aren't Asian, they can't speak Chinese or Japanese, but they insist that their tattoo says "Strong Warrior" or "Ninja Champion" or some such crap, but it could just as easily be some nonsense yanked off a fortune cookie.
NYT did an article about this a few years back (the whole thing is a good read), discussing tattoos that ended up saying "power piglet" or "demon bird moth balls": http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/fashion/sundaystyles/02tattoos.html?pagewanted=all
Tattoo artists — few of whom know Chinese — copy the characters from templates that are often of uncertain provenance and are easily corrupted if a word is unwittingly substituted, or if someone decides to take liberties by altering a few strokes. When two characters are combined to form what is in English a catchy phrase, context can be lost and the result can be hilarious — or worse.
"Everybody here that does tattoos, we understand that if you combine the characters together, they have a different meaning," said Ricky Sturdivant, a tattoo artist in Normal, Ill. "We try to express that to the customers, but sometimes they want us to do it anyway."
Errors are common enough to be good business for tattoo removal specialists, and to fuel a blog, www.hanzismatter.com, which posts photographs of botched tattoos accompanied by sardonic commentary from Tian Tang, a Chinese-born engineering student.
The blog takes the name Hanzi Smatter from the Chinese term for the ideograms that are composed of as many as 30 strokes and take years of practice to write fluently. Hanzi are also used extensively in Japan, where they are referred to as kanji, and to a lesser degree in South Korea.
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