No, absolutes are incredibly rare. If you’re asking “always” or “never”, there will typically be exceptions.
I approve of your use of “typically” here.
no but for many they do. I have known people with complicated patterns and complex stories around them and lol I was drunk.
I have a friend who got a Chinese letter tattoo on his arm.
It was supposed to say “Strength” or some such, but it was actually the word for “arm”.
This’d be fun to get intentionally.
– Frost
I’ve often thought, were I to ever get tattoos, it would have to start with RIGHT and LEFT on the backs of my hands.
Maybe even reversed, as a test for people when they see them.
Do they notice?
Will they say something?Personally my favorite tattoo of an idea to play with the viewers ignorance. I want a tattoo that is just “Leviticus 19:28” as a fun poke at people who get bible verse tattoos.
Leviticus 19:28
For those who don’t know:
Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the Lord.
I write a big “L” on the toe of my right boot and a big “R” on the toe of the left.
It’s amazing how many people it triggers
Yes, I’m a cunt
There are short videos on YouTube (search for “westerners’ Chinese tattoos”) where a Chinese person reads out what some of those tattoos translate to, some are hilarious, others just gibberish…
That’s a really dick move on the tattooer part, borderline scam.
I would guess that the tattooer had no clue. That is incompetence better explains this than malice
That’s hilarious!
Depends how strict you mean. A friend of mine got a stickman on his index finger and a trampoline on his thumb so he can pull them together and apart to make the stickman bounce on it.
It’s funny, but it’s also extremely meaningless. Technically the meaning could be fun but I don’t think there is a real one.
So no. I personally prefer tattoos on myself to have meaning, but I also heard usually the more tattoos you have the less important meaning becomes and lots of times people do it because it looks cool. Especially broad patterns and things like sleeves lean more into a design than into meaningful motifs, so that’s a whole category of tattoos that doesn’t necessarily have a meaning. And that’s only a small part of tattoos.
No. I have a star shaped tattoo. Because I like star shapes.
I don’t think so. First things that come to mind are this:
- some people get tattos just for sex appeal. While they could attach meaning to the event, that would be a second order effect and probably not that meaningful. The meaning attached would maybe be “i love sex.”
- some people get names of partners tattooed. I think that’s a very simple and clear “meaning” so isn’t worth mentioning
- some people have hste symbols tsttooed, which don’t hold much meaning IMO.
I imagine some people just think they’re neat - both those who get an awful lot of them and people who haven’t got a lot. You could express thst sith a bell curve meme. Pretend the “iq” axis is about tattoo coverage though.
- some people have hste symbols tsttooed, which don’t hold much meaning IMO.
Uh. Yeah they do. Normally tattoos of that nature are used to signal being part of that group. Same as with gang tats. You see a dude with a swastika, he’s letting you know he’s a Nazis.
It’s expensive, a lot of pain and time… so it’s usually a safe assumption that it has a meaning to them. But obviously like everything it’s not universal… clearly there is a (hopefully small) percentage of people who get a tattoo because of a random drunkin whim, or to impress someone etc…
Eh, the recent trend in my culture has been to get lots of flash (like the Clipart of an artist). There’s no meaning besides appreciating an artist’s style or making a reference to something with a logo/symbol/figurehead
In practice, sure—if nothing else, it means they wanted a tattoo. The mere presence of a tattoo has some cultural relevance, even if the particular design is otherwise meaningless. (Unless they got it involuntarily like an Auschwitz tattoo, which still has meaning of a different kind.)
You could say it’s something that will leave a mark.
No, not always. People get tattoos for all sorts of reasons.
I personally have tattoos that are memorials, are rites of passage, or are reflections of my philosophies. I also have flash tattoos that I got on a whim.
Yeah, it means they got a tattoo
There was a tattoo parlor near my house that had a gumball machine with a bunch of stickers in it. Put a quarter in the machine and they would give you a discount on a tattoo with that design on it.
