Tattoos Lost In Translation 

Toilet Goblin made me make the most horrific cackling seagull noise I've ever heard. I would genuinely get that tattoo on purpose.

"She wanted 'Bad Ass' but she got 'Evil Butt'" That's literally what she asked for.

“Illiterate Foreigner” is probably the most brutally honest and relevant tattoo I’ve ever seen.

“Translator server error” tattoo in a foreign language is actually a top tier tattoo, self-irony and meta commentary at the same time. Probably much deeper than whatever else was planned for the arm.

These seem to fall into three distinct categories: 1)They got exactly what they asked for, but it did not mean the same thing in Japanese or Chinese as it did in English. 2)The tattoo artist did not speak Chinese or Japanese and copied the character wrong 3)The tattoo artist knew exactly what they were doing 😂😂😂

Got to be honest, the guy with the economic recession tattoo for sure got what he asked for.

Huge fan of how the Live Laugh Love tattoo artist didn’t realize that “koi” (恋) for romantic love and “koi” (鯉) for Japanese carp are not, in fact, the same kanji

I worked with this white guy with a chinese tattoo. I asked him why he had that tattooed on him. He said it means "wise man". A Chinese coworker goes by while we were looking at his tattoo and I asked her to look at it. She goes whyd you tattoo that? He said it means wise man. Shes like no, its an herb. He got the word "sage" tattooed thinking it meant wise man, but the character was for the plant

Tattooing "foot" on your head is the highest form of comedy and that person should be rewarded.

You should do this again but for English tattoos in foreign countries. I heard about one that said "no pan, no gain"

Worked on a rig in Indonesia and asked the radio operator to print a label for a flight case which would read “Computer - Fragile” Got stopped by the police at Changhi airport who asked why I was walking around with a case which read “Confused and delicate” 😂 Unlike tattoos, you can easily remove labels

"I once believed there was only one way to write 'Gullible White Boy', but then I met a tattoo artist who had written it a thousand different ways." My Chinese friend's mom, when she saw me admiring some tattoos on a Google image search.

ok but getting "translator server error" tattooed on you is actually fucking hilarious

My friend tried to get a 'I am vegetarian' tattoo in japanese but it ended up saying 'I am made of vegetables'. When told this, my other friend said 'you are what you eat'

I mean, "dead person at no charge" is technically correct depending on you interpret "free spirit"

The Latin phrase, 'Sit dolor amit' translates as 'let the pain be lost', while the one-letter difference of 'Sit dolor amir' means 'let it be a pain in the ass'. This one difference could make for a hell of a tattoo lost in translation.

I mean... "economic recession" is legitimately *really bad* so I think the tattoo artist did exactly what was asked of them.

I love how half of these are legitimately understandable mistakes and the other half of them were obviously pranks. it makes perfect sense that "grand son" could've accidentally been translated to "fat boy," but there is no goddamn way that a chinese tattoo artist tattoed "Illiterate Foreigner" by accident.

A friend of mine wanted to have the "Year of the Ox" (the Chinese calendar year she was born in) tattooed on her ankle (who knows why). The tattoo artist decided that "I am a cow" in Chinese was appropriate.

when i was about 10 my parents let me decorate my room however i wanted. i decided on wallpaper painted a sky blue. the wallpaper in question was textured and had two repeating Chinese characters because i though it would demonstrate how deep and spiritual i was (as a 10 year old white boy). we later had some Chinese foreign exchange students stay with us. one of them came into my room and was so confused. I asked him what was wrong without realizing and his response was "why do you have East City all over the walls"

I heard about a Japanese tattoo artist who had an American customer who asked for a tattoo that said "lover of Asian beauties" in Japanese The artist wrote "foreign pervert" instead

I'm currently studying Japanese, (or more correctly, trying to study Japanese) and I think it would be funny to get something really weird tattooed on purpose. People might think I tried to get something fake deep, but in reality I have tomato criminal on my arm.

I'm sure a big part of this also results from people not considering that Chinese writing and Japanese kanji are *entirely different languages* from english so maybe that very English idiom you wanted on your body doesn't actually translate into anything that makes sense. Not to mention the many many different ways that kanji can be read. Anyway, maybe don't get permanently tattooed in a language you don't understand if you're never gonna be able to actually appreciate the meaning even if it did translate right. Like, what are you getting out of it? The thing that gets me the most is people asking for "their initials in Chinese". *That's literally not a thing*. If you don't even understand the BASICS of a language (like that it isn't spelled with letters) then what meaning will it have for you?

I got the word quiet tattooed on my arm. People think it was an accident, but really i got it for my Japanese aunt (not a blood relative). The only time i ever heard her speak was when she told her about-to-become-ex-husband "quiet." She had been so quiet for so long, and so now it was her turn to demand silence.

A common thing for artists to do is write something stupid in Chinese, Japanese and Korean (most commonly). They then sell the artwork to someone who does not understand the language who will then put the picture that says ‘cheese with a side of nachos’ on their wall. Edit: Matt, next, you should do people misnaming celebrities. Edit 2: omg! Just realised this got 5.4K likes! Tysm!! (Sorry to be that person lol)

The one with "Live, Laugh, CARP" actually makes sense. For the last word, they requested "koi", which (depending on context) means both "carp" and "love" in Japanese, with different kanji ofc.

“Use other entrance” was actually pretty clever and probably intentional.

My favourite tattoo "accident" is the guy who had "Please may I have permission to use the toilet?" in Irish "An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas". Apparently, they thought it said "You will forever be in my heart " but I reckon it was a comedy tattoo.

This is hilarious! As someone who speaks Chinese, I'm going to keep a lookout for tattoos like these. There are so many words that sound similar but mean completely different things. I can imagine someone getting a tattoo on their 40th birthday and thinking it says "40", but it actually says "dead snake".

“Illiterate foreigner” is absolutely perfect. If I’d just asked for random characters, and got that, I wouldn’t even be mad.

When I was a kid, living in Japan, my family and I would sometimes see people wearing T-shirts with random English words on them, exactly like this. I remember one T-shirt had a prominent Pepsi logo, but said something like, "exit here". Also, we would sometimes see signs that were spelled bilingually, but the English so badly misspelled, it would sometimes be months before we figured out what the sign was intending to say. The only one that comes to mind right now, part of the sign read, 'yootereti', which meant to say, 'utility'.

Someone who overheard me speaking Chinese asked me what their tattoo said. Now, I can't _read_ much Chinese but I knew that one...So Chinese characters can have more than one meaning depending on context. The topic of conversation can change what the character means in that situation or what other characters its paired with. While the same character _can_ have wildly different meanings, the meanings are usually at least somewhat related (though not always). Technically her artist didn't lie. He told her it meant 'transcendent spirit' which, well it CAN mean that, but its more commonly used to mean demon or evil spirit sooo...

Imagine getting one of these on purpose, and then when asked by a native speaker what you think your tattoo means, you look them in the eye and say “Squid butt fairy.”

Once had a nice middle aged woman come into my job wearing a shirt with Japanese on the breast pocket and along her back. In horror, I asked her where she got the shirt and said her husband was a businessman who bought it for her while on a business trip and "it says, Hello Kitty or something". It actually said something more along the lines of "dominatrix". I didn't have the heart to tell her, but it remains my favorite encounter with something being "lost in translation".

Circa 1945 in Australia my grandmother was on a train with her friend (both in their early 20s) who had embroidered Chinese characters on her blouse, a Chinese bloke across from her couldn't stop laughing and informed her it meant "mother of nine"

“Free Spirit” and “Dead Person with No Charge” reminds me of “Dirty Deeds Done Dirto Cheap” and “Filthy Acts at a Reasonable Price”

"live, laugh, carp" actually sounds like a good alternative to "live, laugh, love" for country boys

My sister purposely got the words "dumb wh*re" in Korean on her back and went online to troll people by asking them to translate it (she told them it was supposed to say live laugh love-)

There was a story going around in 2015 about a guy in an Arkansas Walmart who had a Hebrew word tattooed on his arm. When someone asked him what it meant, he said "strength." It actually said matzoh, which (quipped the interlocutor) was appropriate for a tasteless cracker.

As a person who speaks Japanese, I saw a tattoo on a woman’s shoulder that said “I’m a potato” and NOT “I’m passionate”.

I'm pretty sure there was a story where someone had 変態外人 (read as hentai gaijin in Japanese) tattooed on them and they think it means lover of Asian beauty. It means foreign pervert. As someone who can speak Japanese fluently, that made me absolutely lose it from laughing so much.

My uncle is Japanese and a tattooist, a lot of his clients are none Japanese people who don’t know Japanese. When he asks what they want they’ll usually just say “ just write something that looks cool” So he always writes the weirdest funniest most immature shit🤣 I remember seeing him tattoo “I like tiny bananas” across this cheerfully looking, yet Completely oblivious Korean boy💀😂 But in my uncles defence, he basically gave him permission to write anything that looked cool

When I've played Yakuza Kiwami I saw one random woman in the street wondering if she would get a tattoo, and Kiryu adviced her against it and to think twice because a tattoo is a personal thing and could affect your life down the line. Seeing this video I can see why.

In college, my classmate from China laughed everytime a certain caucasian lady from a nearby class walked by. The caucasian lady had a Chinese character tattoo on her lower back, which she showed off all the time. I finally got curious and asked... The character was a certain variation of the word chicken which was used as slang to describe a prostitute.

"I asked him for some bad words, something really bad." "economic recession" The tatoo artist has a very dark sense of humour. Also, I feel sorry for the girl with the "use other enterance" tatoo, people mist be thinking of some naughty things with that.

The "public cow" one isn't exactly wrong tho? "Ox" typically translates to “公牛”, with the first character meaning "male" and the second meaning "cow" or "bull". However, the first character can also mean "public" when used in phrases like “公交车” (= public traffic car = bus), “公民” (= public people = citizen), or “公家” (= public family = traditional monarchy). So, it all depends on how you interpret the phrase. I assume that the translator just read the tattoo word-by-word which twisted its meaning into being more awkward.

I’m in the midst of chronic pain Hell and have been absolutely miserable all day…then I watched this video. Now, my gut and and sides are hurting worse than anything because I laughed so fucking hard! Thank you so much! Subscribing now!

"what you got there mate, is chronic hepatitis" had me rolling

I heard a story about a guy who intentionally got "steamed pork dumplings" tattooed on his arm just so he could make ordering at the local Chinese restaurants easier.

Imagine being some Chinese guy who travels to America for once and the first thing that you experience is people showing you their tattoo and tell you their meaning. They be like: ,,it means good vibes only,, But in reality it means ,,Crazhy Hamburgre,,

Some of these, while not what the person wanted, could very much still be cool tattoos

If anyone's wondering about the "Live, Laugh, Carp" one, both 恋 and 鯉 are pronounced "koi" (こい).

My mom’s friend told me this story, she had been walking down the street with her Japanese fluently speaking and writing, and she saw this woman with a tattoo in Japanese characters, her friend walks up to this person and acts them what is says, and person responds “Oh, it means ‘Love, peace, and hope!” And this person didn’t tell her, but what it actually what it said was “Anger, Sadness, and hopelessness”

I'm a translator of Japanese to English and I see these all the time. My favourite find in the wild was a man with what he claimed was 'football' kanji on his shoulder, cheerfully sunburning his way down Sidmouth prom. It actually said 瓜 (Uri) which, rather appropriately, means 'melon'. Being lubricated by a day of good cider I told him what it meant, but happily he laughed it off. The next year I spotted him again, and he'd rather smartly had it amended to read 嵐 (Arashi) which means 'Storm'. Still not football but at least my dude was making the best of a bad job! Hoping to spot him again this year and see what new delights that painted man has for me.

If you have a tattoo in a foreign language, and someone asks you "What do you think that means?" be very afraid, because it is 100% not what you thought it means

If you go to like Japan and look at all the stuff people sell with English on them, they all translate like these do. So having a weirdly translated words that just looks cool, is actually fitting with the culture.

My father, being the absolute nut case that he is, got his coworker who is fluent in Chinese to translate “combo number 5” (or directly it’s “meal number 5”) then got it tattooed on his leg. He was so proud of it that the next time we had gone to the Chinese restaurant we like and knew the owners of, he excitedly shown his tattoo to the one owner and said “it means peace love and happiness”. She then said “no it doesn’t” then my dad confessed that he knows it means meal number 5 and specifically got it to clown on people who don’t know what they’re getting written on their body

I remember reading about a (presumably nice/neckbearded) guy who went to Japan or something and wanted a tattoo that said “appreciator of Asian beauty.” The tattoo artist gave him a tattoo that instead translated to “foreign pervert.” Update: A close second goes to a man who got tattoos of the kanji for ‘reason’ and ‘living’ or something like that. He probably wanted it to say ‘reason for living,’ which is fair. But apparently, if you put those two symbols together, it means ‘menstruation.’

I now unironically want a tattoo saying “Beep beep lettuce” In English.

I ran out of oxygen becuse hysterical laugh. Thank you for brightening my day!

"I love my grandson" being "I love fat boys" is actually just a misunderstanding from the the translators part, they've must have accidentally wrote in "Grand Son" and not "Grandson"

When my father was a wrestler, he worked with this Japanese guy, and these four other guys. Guy number one, who we’ll call True Translator was a Japanese immigrant who spoke both English and Japanese fluently. He worked with my dad and these other guys. One of these guys decided to get a Japanese tattoo that said, “Immortality and Strength” or something dumb like that. He shows up to work the next day sporting his new ink, and True Human Translator was like, “Alright - Why the Hell do you have special fried rice number seven tattooed on your arm?” The guy never lived that down. 😂

I once saw a guy in a public swimming pool with a huge tattoo of a chinese character on his arm, it kind of looked like the character for water 水 but had two extra random strokes, I thought I just didnt learn that one yet so I tried writing it down in my notes app to look up later, such a character does not exist.

My friend was trying to get something but then got “spill milk” our Chinese friend told us what it translated to (spill milk), it was such a good opportunity that I HAD to say “don’t cry over spilled milk”

Imagine you're trying to get a funny tatoo but the Chinese artist thinks you've made a mistake and wants to be nice to you so you think for years you're the funny man with your tatoo but it really means "patience and determination."

What baffles me is people who asked for their initials. Like, the ENTIRE CONCEPT here is that they have symbols that stand for words or ideas, not letters that correspond to phonetic sounds. Your initials are, like, the ONE thing that it makes ZERO sense to ask for! How can you fail to understand something on such a basic level?

Read through the first few hundred comments and laughing like crazy, now at around @0:40 'picnic table' one destroyed my lunch. Menu items make the most sense to me as it'd be something I'd consider, a pretty set of characters expressing my desire for yummy food I cannot pronounce. :) These are hilarious, TYVM OP!

A friend of mine had a tattoo in japanese and she had a whole philosophc story behind it. Once we went for a coffee and at the next table there were some japanese turists and I noticed they were looking at her and trying to disguise their amusement. I went to them and asked them about it and at first they didn't want to tell me, but on my insistance, they finally told me it was actually some canned mackrell. We had a really good lough! Few days later my friend came with her tattoo covered with a different one. Just be careful with things you don't understand and do your homework!

5:38 Actually, 妖 is also a commonly used term for mythical creatures in China that can turn into beautiful women, usually to seduce and lure men into giving them their soul, with their original form being usually animals. could be understood as a demon or succubus. Most well known ones are probably 狐妖 or 蛇妖, which could roughly be translated to fox succubus or snake succubus. Yeah, so basically, that man tattooed "toilet succubus" onto himself.

I have asian parents so they naturally made learn mandarin and it's HILARIOUS to see some of these tatoos in person

Just subscribed to your channel. This was priceless!

As a translator who's regretful of life choices, I'd gladly got myself "Translator error" tatoo

I feel like people don't realize there's words that don't have exact translations from one language to the other. Also the fact that some languages straight up don't have that word.

The character 菜( vegetables) also means "suck at something" in oral chinese, like when we say "你好菜啊( literally you are so vegetables)", we mean to say " you’re so weak". And combined with those fierce looking eyes in the tattoo, it’s even funnier lol

3:00 this one actually makes sense, there are actually no L sounds in Japanese, they just get substituted by R sounds. Because of this, it's very possible to wonder if the sound made was supposed to be an L or an R

I have seen photos of 'Translator Server Error' but not as a tattoo. It was a big printed sign above a shop and was meant to be the name or nature of the business but.... you know.

As a Chinese person myself, I would personally love to get a tattoo and tell everybody like "oh this means peace" but in reality it's just the character for cheese

My grandad got a tattoo while on holiday in the Canary Islands, it was supposed to say “Jackie” in Chinese which is my nan’s name. However we discovered that every Chinese person we asked in Chinatown would do a kung fu pose and shout “JACKIE CHAN”.

There was a guy at this party showing off his new tattoo that had Chinese characters that he claimed to mean something like "enlightened soul" or something corny like that. All the while I was wondering if the tattoo artist may have had a sense of humor and written "pretentious jerk" instead.

i would intentionally get a tattoo that says "illiterate foreigner" just to mess with people

I work at a tattoo shop as an apprentice. They made me and the other apprentice organize different kinds of tattoo flashes/designs, one of which was Chinese symbols. To make a joke around the idea that people have no clue what they're getting, I drew two fun Chinese symbols on the front of the folder organizing them. When our boss noticed the drawing we were complimented for our "creativity". I wrote the symbols for "butt soup"...

七輪 actually does (roughly) mean "seven rings". It just also has other meanings. It'd be like someone getting "7-Eleven" tattooed because their birthday is July 11th. Also, the Chinese word for ox/bull actually is 公牛. 公 means "public" and 牛 means "cow". These people don't know Chinese, they just put it into Google translate.

My cousin’s wife has Japanese characters down her arm that translates to, “I have no idea what this means”. She got it on purpose.

I can't believe this video is a year old, I remember when it came out

I had a classmate in college who got a tattoo that was supposed to say “purity” in Chinese on her forearm. It was supposed to be a promise to herself to stay pure while focusing on her studies. I was dabbling with calligraphy at the time and understood what it said and that wasn’t it. They gave her the word penguin spelling it like business goose. She was disappointed when she found out but hey, it’s a good thing she was in a business program.

It's weird, but I remember the Japanese used to walk around with shirts in English that were just gibberish. I remember a shirt that read "Hello Mayonnaise" on it. The idea that we would return the favor with Japanese gibberish kind of makes sense.

This has got to be my favorite video ever.

Absolutely love this guys voice!! I’d listen to him no matter the content, tho this is hilarious

"Love and Strawberries" sounds like a generic British love novel from the 60s Also: "Fast and foolish" sounds like a Chinese comedy action movie

my dad is into tattoos and he had a horrible phase where he was obsessed with getting tattoos of my name but in different languages, until he found out most of them were just nonsense words that didnt mean anything. thankfully hes now moved on to tattoos of like dragons and stuff, and leaving my name out of it

3:57 the 3 characters actually means " fugitive ". 躲藏 = hiding / running away. 犯 = ( person committed a crime ).

Omfg i love the way you speak and say these sentences. Giving me a good laugh at the random emphasises, "MOVE" 😂

Having the word 'madman' tattooed on you in Japanese would've been legitimately badass if he had done it on purpose

2:22 makes sense because 恋 is read as koi(love) and 鯉 is also read as koi(y'know, the fish) so someone must have romanized it before chugging it into kanji

Thank you for a good laugh. I laughed until I cried

On one of the last days of school, my Chinese teacher showed us a bunch of these bad tattoos and we translated the ones we knew. Fun times

Standing outside a tattoo shop in Australia looking at the pictures/examples of his work. And in the middle was a sign written in what i assumed was Chinese. After a few minutes i worked out that if you tilt your head to the side the sign was actually in English that said something along the lines of. "No i don't do Chinese characters as you just end up looking like a fucing dickhead" it was very cleverly done.

These are absolutely, and epically- genius!

Ow, my face hurts from laughing so hard! 😂 Would love to see the reverse as well- we see a lot of bad tattoos from English into non-Roman scripts and other languages, wonder if there's a similar phenomenon of bad English tattoos overseas?

I'd genuinely find "economic recession" and "beep beep lettuce" to be amazing tattoos.