Recently, while I was looking for some ridiculous tattoos to make fun of them I've found this little gem on ratemyink.com:
The person who posted the photo says about this tattoo: My best friend did this one. It means I Love You in Japanese. (see the picture above).
Well, she is wrong, and I'll briefly explain why:
1. The ideogram is poorly written and is missing several strokes
2. "shiteru" is written with Katakana, but it should be written with hiragana (read this article on wikipedia if you want to know more about the differences between Hiragana and Katakana.)
3. The Kana characters should be written on the same line
4. The first character written in Katakana (shi) is missing two strokes, so it's not the "shi" character anymore, it's "no". This mistake transforms the phrase from "ai shiteru" (I love you) in the moronic phrase "ai no teru", which means "The tell of love" (tell = type of archaeological mound created by human occupation and abandonment of a geographical site over many centuries).
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Don't believe this guy - he has no idea what he's talking about:)
This is NOT a Kanji / Hanzi tattoo. This is just a doodle.
What possibly could be wrong with this tattoo?