You know it's some ancient post because it had awards.

Unfortunately, it's been dead for a couple of years now, but this blog used to translate everyone's Asian-language tattoos.

A significant number of them use characters that are not from any language at all.

Quite a few that do have meanings are pretty funny, sometimes are quite ironic too.

https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/

Edit: I forgot about this, but it's still on the front page of that blog and I laughed all over again.

I was in line behind someone who had 安 on her nape. I'm guessing she was going for a meaning of like peaceful or restful or something along those lines but you need a compound like 安心 or 安静 for that.

The character alone means more like cheap, at least in Japanese. Maybe it's different in Chinese.

In Wales road signs are printed in both English and Welsh. When a new sign was being made someone sent the English part to a translator, who's out of office message was in Welsh. They assumed that message was the translation and printed it on the sign.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mistranslated-welsh-traffic-sign/

Not a translation error but the worst tattoo I ever saw on someone was a guy with a bloody tampon tramp stamp.

变态外人
biàntài wàirén

I never tattooed it on myself, or anyone else, but I used to work at a local greasy spoon, and knew a Professor of English that came in regularly, who was originally from China. I asked him for the name specific characters that phonetically made up the syllables of my and my girlfriend's names, he went to wait for his food, and came back with the characters he thought would work best. I used those to burn the characters into the weed stash box that she and I had made.

We told everyone that asked that we had no clue what it actually meant, it just sounded like our names.

I knew a guy who had "bad to the bone" written on his neck in Chinese. The problem is, the phrase doesn't translate at all.

So, his tattoo read as "my bones are bad"

Tbf, he was a clown and had something like that coming.

I know someone who has something tattooed on him: in Thai.

As in, it's a phrase which says 'in Thai' in Thai. So when people ask him, what is that? He says 'it's in Thai'. They say yes, but what is it? 'It's 'in Thai''. Yes, but...

You get the idea.

I was thinking of getting 何か日本語で "nanika nihongo de" and if someone would ask me what it meant I’d say "something in Japanese"