3. Chinese Tattoos
I’m all up for permanently marking our anatomies with overused and supposedly ‘symbolic-at-the-time’ ink drawings, but the thing that really pisses me off is when people don’t even know what their own tattoo says. Be it ancient Greek, Latin or –my personal favourite – mandarin, there is absolutely no point in etching meaningless words into your skin that you don’t even understand. “I know what my ultra-original Chinese character tattoo says!” I hear you say, “It means ‘earth’/ ‘light’/ ‘mountain summit’”. Ah, how very profound of you. Too bad 40million others have that exact same tattoo. If it was written in English it’d look silly – you’d be a fool to have ‘zodiac’ written across your lower back. So why does Chinese make it acceptable? Do you even know what a zodiac is? It’s an imaginary belt extending 8° either side of the ecliptic, which contains the 12 zodiacal constellations and within which the moon and planets appear to move. Now, who wouldn’t want that written permanently on their shoulder?
