Tattoos tend to reveal a lot about an individual’s personality and popstar Ariana Grande is known for her tiny — albeit meaningful — tattoos. The God is a Woman hitmmaker, recently got a Japanese alphabetical character tattooed on her palm, which she thought meant ‘7 rings’ — Grande’s latest hit single. Unfortunately, lost in the translation, the tattoo ended up meaning ‘7 bbq grill’. In an attempt to fix it, Grande got another tattoo done, which turned out to be an even bigger faux pas, as the tattoo now means ‘7 bbq fingers’.
While the singer was trolled mercilessly on the internet, Ariana is not the only one who got an incorrect tattoo. Celebrities like Rihanna and David Beckham have also been known for major goof-ups with their foreign language tattoos, that did not mean what they thought it did... Given that each alphabetical character in many oriental languages, such as Chinese, Mandarin and Japanese, may have multiple meanings and philosophies attached to it, we try to understand the obsession of getting tattoos in different languages and how to stay away from a ‘lost-in-translation’ disaster.
Celebrity tattoo artist Vikas Malani, who has worked with the likes of Aamir Khan and Shibani Dandekar, spills the beans, saying the major reason people get a tattoo in a different language is to look ‘cool’. “To be honest people do not think their tattoos through when they get the generic foreign language tattoo and thus it is either misspelled or weirdly translated meanings. In case of Bollywood celebrities, some of them tend to get the wackiest tattoos just to hog limelight and attention or just to even promote their films.”
Ariana was also accused of culturally appropriating the language (that had no connection to the song) to promote her single.
Ankur Jha, a 25-year-old professional, from the city, says his Russian tattoo was well-thought out. “I was into Russian literature at one point and my parents used to be involved in words related to Russian translation, so the language was not completely unknown. My tattoo meant ‘new beginning’... a Russian proverb. I got it done to mark my 18th birthday.”
Another young professional, Rahul Pillai who has a Japanese symbol of love tattooed on his nape, says, “I got the tattoo at a time when I used to watch a lot of anime (a japanese animation culture). And also because I did not really want people to immediately know what my tattoo meant.”
