BAD: Chinese Tattoo Symbol vs. Japanese Kanji

Kimberly attached the picture below in a Chinese tattoo confirmation request and asked the following:

"Me and my sister had the same tattoo put on the back of our neck. We were told that it meant "Bad"....but we have recently seen in another shop signs for "BAD" that look nothing like our tattoos so now we are curious as to what our tattoo's mean. We only got the sign for BAD because we liked how the sign looked...but we didnt want the sign for some off the wall thing either :( so please help me figure out what me and my sister have tatted on the back of our necks ?????"

Hi Kimberly,

From the way the character is written, it looks like it is a Kanji character (Chinese characters that are adopted in the Japanese language). It is very similar to the equivalent Chinese character, and most likely will be understood by Chinese, but they do have slightly different meanings:

Japanese Kanji (according to my dictionary, as I am not Japanese): One direct translation is "bad", and other possibilities include "evil", "vice", "wrong", "inferior", "harmful", "unlucky", etc.

Chinese character: It only contains meanings along the lines of "evil", "wickedness" or "hatred" and "loathsome". A more negative association is implied.

Also, it does look like the character is not correctly written. The two slanted/vertical lines on the right do not have any meaning in Chinese. In Japanese, it seems to be a phonetic alphabet found in Japanese Kana (a script, such that Kanji is another script). I am not aware that pairing up with the word "bad" gives it any meaning, but I'm not an expert in Japanese, so I could be wrong. The only other possibility that I know of is that it is an incorrectly written version of the word "person". To be certain, you may want to follow-up with a Japanese native.

Chinese Tattoo for "Hero" + Name Translation

I received this Chinese tattoo confirmation request from Becky:  "I was told the top one was hero and the bottom one was my husbands name Eric. Would you please help me and tell me the meaning. I looked up hero my self and got something way different. The tattoo is on my foot and it is not by any other tattoo's."

Hi Becky,

For the word 杰 - at first glance, I recognized it to be common Chinese male name. If I were to speak for the average Chinese folk, one probably would not immediately draw any connection to "hero".

The main reason Becky found the word "hero" a completely different one in her own research (which probably was 英雄, as in the same translation for the Chinese movie Hero with Jet Li) is that character itself has a meaning along the lines of "outstanding" or "prominent", or at best "an outstanding person", which is primarily used only in ancient/literary text.

In other words, this character should probably not have been used for "hero", but it's also not completely wrong. I suppose that if the symbolism to you is most important, then at least it's a good looking character. Incidentally, it also is one of the characters in Jet Lee's Chinese name -- 李連杰.

As for the name "Eric" -- it's more or less correct. Because English names translated into Chinese are merely approximations of English sounds, there is some flexibility in their translation. However, this also means that such English name translations evolve, and Becky's one is an example of an outdated version. The good news: it means what you intended.