I sometimes see people who have strange tattoos of Chinese characters or
Japanese letters. When you ask Japanese your tattoos meaning, Japanese don’t say your tattoos is strange. Japanese think the strange tattoos meaning hurts their mind.
We can’t wipe tattoos easily as writing on a chalkboard. Before having something tattoos, you should ask native persons or study. If Japanese doesn’t say good, the tattoos may have strange meaning.
Example, “犯罪者” mean a criminal. “凶悪” mean “凶悪” mean like atrocious and evil, this is not like “bad guy”. “八方美人” mean like “being yes man and apple-polisher for everyone”, not like “Everybody’s friend” or “Beautiful for everyone”. “八方” mean “around”. “美人” mean “beautiful person”. However they aren’t bad meaning, the words become bad meaning.
Japanese has three characters as “漢字(Kanji)”, “ひらがな(Hiragana)”, “カタカナ(Katakana)”. Making cool sentence mixed three characters is very difficult even if native Japanese speaker. Making good meaning sentence isn’t so difficult but Japanese doesn’t think the sentence is good for tattoos.
If you are looking for good sentence, you should think quoting from Japanese old style poems has good sentence like “和歌(Waka)”, “川柳(Senryu)” or Chinese poem “漢詩(kanshi)”. Waka is very short style. Senryu is shorter than Waka. Kanshi is writing in only Chinese characters.
Japanese old style poems are written very common things at a glance, but almost phrase is used in a figurative sense. When you make a original sentence in Japanese, thinking about a figurative sense of Waka or Senryu will be helpful.
