Thursday, May 18, 2006

Cloudy

I have seen tattooists sometimes would add extra parts to Chinese character tattoo, in order to give it a little more “flair”, and have failed miserably.

For example, in this photo sent in by NDC of his friend’s new tattoo:



The poor chump was told this character meant "vengeance". If the intended character was (head, chief), then the cloud has completely covered the two important dots. Thus, the character is meaningless.

There is an old Chinese idiom called 畫蛇添足. Literally, it means “draw a snake and add feet to it”, or “to do something unnecessary”.