Inked Magazine - Mistaken Identity

Earlier this year I was interviewed by Janet Tzou for Inked magazine. The articled titled "Mistaken Identity" is in the Spring 2006 issue.

The ironic part of this article is even the Editor-in-Chief himself of Inked magazine, Mike Salman, has botched Asian-inspired tattoos.

It took me 27 years to get my first tattoo. I had been going to acupuncture for a little over a year and I developed a great relationship with Dr. Chan, to the point where I started to study Qi Gong with him.

My wife and I have always been into jade and had pieces for our Chinese birth years, so I decided to tattoo the symbol of the Ox and my birth date written out in Chinese characters. Who better to write it out than Dr. Chan?

He wrote two lines in beautiful characters and it was to read "July 10 Ninteen Hundred Seventy Three" with the symbol of the Ox in between.

I didn't like how it looked with all of the characters so I decided to abbreviate it and make it read "7 10 73."

Thing is, I don't know how to read Chinese.

So I attempted to change it to what I thought was correct by just taking the number characters and rearrangeing them. I was wrong.

Moral of the story, always do your research and get a second opinion just in case.

Kai Yu of Asian Media Watch has pretty much summed up the whole trend with this quote:

I think it's natural for any individual to be interested in things that are different.

But as much as I want to believe that people get Asian calligraphy tattoos out of cultural admiration, I don't think it usually reaches that level.

There has to be some earnest understanding of what you are getting, otherwise it's nothing but a trinket.