"Melanie" or "Plum Orchid Maid"
An email tip lead me to this "uber-macho" tattoo at Hezeleid.com. It belongs to user "strange_tag". Since he refused to tell eveyone what his tattoo meants, I guess I will do that here.
Phonetically pronounced in Mandarin Chinese, it should sound like "mei lan ni" or "melanie". The problem is that although Japanese and Chinese share kanji/hanzi characters, their pronounciations are different.
If the characters are literally translated, they are:
梅 = plums
兰 (traditional version: 蘭) = orchid
妮 = maid
posted by tian at
3:46 PM
7 Comments:
Reading around on the Forum, someone seems to be insinuating that he's a huge fan of Melanie C from Spice Girls, who also sports a Chinese tattoo on her right shoulder that says 女力, girl power.
In Japanese it would be bai-ran-ni, pretty much the same as Mandarin aside from the common m/b shift. I don't think the third character exists in modern Japanese, but the radical 尼 is read as 'ni' so I guess that works for it.
I'll vote for the name Melanie.
How would I go about finding what my Tattoo means?
sent a photo of your tattoo to me via email:
tiangotlost at gmail dot com
Hmm. Makes one wonder why someone would tattoo themselves with characters they don't understand.
M.
I'm in China now, from USA and my wife is chinese, she just said what's that? And I told her you had some photos of people's tattoos with chinese...she said why did that guy get a tat with britney spears name on it? Mei la ni does sound like melanie but the translation from english to 'han yu' is strange, I think you know...anyways hooray for him, if he goes to China everyone will think he is great because they all love britney out here *puke*
I think most educated Chinese would instantly recognize it as a woman's name, since those characters are commonly used in transliterations of names. Also, the first two characters are common in Chinese women's names, and the last in foreign women's names.
Though I'm not a native speaker of Chinese, I recognized right away it as a name.
My only beef is that the second character is simplified. Traditional characters look infinitely better on tattoos, or any in art form (calligraphy, painting, etc.) for that matter.
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