Here are the most popular Chinese symbols used for a tattoo and their meaning. Here's an example, on the left (in black) is the traditional Chinese character for 'Chinese', next to it (in red) is the simplified character: They are used in mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore. Simplified Chinese characters have less number of strokes than traditional Chinese. Most Chinese words are written with multiple characters, one for each syllable.īesides traditional Chinese there is also Simplified Chinese, an attempt to increase literacy in China. There are about 47,000 Hanzi characters, but many of them are unused (to be fully literate, you need to know about 4000 of them). Hanzi is the name for the traditional Chinese characters used in the official written language of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese communities out of China. Find a tattoo artist who has had experience with Chinese character tattoos and can render the writing correctly. If you are thinking about getting a Chinese writing tattoo, make sure you get your translation from a reliable source so the design really means what you think it does.Īlso, make sure that the tattoo artist you select is able to reproduce the translation correctly.

Going back to the tattoo shop, he found out it had closed. He found out the truth when he noticed the effect his tattoo had on a woman serving at a Chinese restaurant, who reluctantly translated the tattoo for him. He wanted the Mandarin characters for 'Love, honor and obey' etched on his skin, but he got quite a shock when he learned his Chinese tattoo really meant: ' At the end of the day, this is an ugly boy'. There was this article in the newspaper a couple of years ago about a teenager who paid $180 to have his arm tattooed with Chinese characters. Chinese character tattoo design meaning 'Snake'Ī word of warning: research the Chinese symbols you are interested in thoroughly, you don't want to be the subject of a story like this one:

New beginning serenity symbol tattoo