Shad Magness wanted to celebrate the love he felt for his young son with a grand gesture.
At a Los Angeles tattoo parlor four years ago, he had two Chinese characters etched in a prominent spot on his left forearm. He assumed that the translation in the sample book the tattoo artist showed him -- "one love" -- was correct.
The first sign of trouble came six months later, when Magness was shopping at a Staples store and the checkout clerk informed him that the characters on his arm meant not "one love" but "love hurts."
Magness consulted some bilingual co-workers, who confirmed the bad news: His tattoo did indeed trumpet the pain of failed love.
"I've been kind of embarrassed about it ever since," said Magness, 31, a real estate appraiser in Orange, California. "I guess that's what you get for not being able to read it."
Magness is now undergoing a series of time-consuming treatments to remove the tattoo, which appropriately enough to the sometimes ouch-inspiring procedure can also mean "loves the pain."
Christina Norton of Redondo Beach, California, is also getting her tattoo lasered off.
At the tattoo parlor, "I asked the guy, `Are you sure?"' Norton said. "He assured me, so then I went ahead and did it."
Now she knows that her tattoo is meaningless out of context with other characters.
"Ever since I found out, I was like, I have to get it off," she said.
James Morel, the CEO of Dr Tattoff, tattoo removal specialists in Beverly Hills, California, says his clinics sign up five or six new patients a week who, like Magness and Norton, have discovered that their Chinese tattoos mean something drastically different from what they intended.
The Chinese character tattoos, which have been popular for more than a decade, are as commonly spotted on college students from the heartland as they are on baristas in Berkeley.
Sports Illustrated recently featured a spread on NBA players' Chinese tattoos, quoting the Chicago Bulls center Tyson Chandler as saying he checked with Yao Ming of the Houston Rockets before getting a tattoo meaning "love."
Britney Spears was apparently not so cautious. She reportedly got a tattoo she thought said "mysterious" but actually meant "strange."
At the root of the craze for Chinese tattoos is the same fascination for Eastern traditions that has fanned interest in feng shui and Asian-theme clothing and decor. But by imprinting the Chinese characters indelibly into their skin, the owners of the tattoos take their Asian fetish, and the consequences of less-than-perfect knowledge, to a different level.
Because they must rely on the word of others to ascertain the meaning of the characters, they are vulnerable to honest mistakes as well as malicious jokesters.
Tattoo artists -- few of whom know Chinese -- copy the charac-ters from templates that are often of uncertain provenance and are easily corrupted if a word is unwittingly substituted, or if someone decides to take liberties by altering a few strokes.
When two characters are combined to form what is in English a catchy phrase, context can be lost and the result can be hilarious -- or worse.
"Everybody here that does tattoos, we understand that if you combine the characters together, they have a different meaning," said Ricky Sturdivant, a tattoo artist in Normal, Illinois.
"We try to express that to the customers, but sometimes they want us to do it anyway," he said.
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