I occasionally see at the climbing gym a caucasian man with the character 專 tattooed on his forearm. I haven't had the opportunity to ask him about it, but it seems like a curious choice for a tattoo. I think of that character in the context of words like 專業 and 專家, so it doesn't really make sense to me to tattoo the word "specialty" on a forearm. Perhaps he has a different reason, or that character has some special meaning to him, or maybe the character has a meaning I'm not really aware of. Personally, I think he thought it was a cool idea to get a tattoo of a Chinese character, but he didn't know enough Chinese to know the exact meaning of that character. Of course, I could be totally wrong. What are your thoughts? Also, have you seen any curious Chinese tattoos? I hear some tattoo parlors in the states won't let patrons get tattoos of Chinese characters because so many get duped into tattooing characters that don't mean what they think they do.

If you want to see a collection of tattoo missteps, try here: http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/ It's a nice corrective to the Chinglish brand of humor.

I've been wanting to get a tattoo that says "I can read this" in Japanese, but I think it would be too wordy, and also I don't really like tattoos.

One of my classmates at school had a fantastic t-shirt that read "白人看不懂" meaning "white people can't understand this."

A doctor I know has the tattoo 心 on her ankle. I hope she doesn't become a surgeon.

@quimby LMAO! That blog is genius! "Policy milk"?!?!?