Japanese Kanji Tattoo Designs

Five Must Knows When Getting a Kanji Tattoo

by Stephen Munday

Q: What do famous celebrities like Pink, Britney Spears and the Spice Girls’ Mel C all have in common?

A: They all have Japanese tattoos!

Japanese tattoos are cool. Of course, if you have money to burn like any of these ladies, you can afford to hire a professional translator to pick out the perfect character combination. But if personal translation is out of your league how can you avoid becoming a kanji fashion victim and get stuck with a tattoo you will really regret?

1. Know the difference ? hiragana, katakana and kanji

Before you talk to your tattoo artist, make sure you know what you are talking about. You say you want a Japanese tattoo, but what do you know about Japanese characters? You need a quick stint in 2-minute Japanese boot camp.

First off, let’s be clear that there is no Japanese “alphabet”. There are three sets of Japanese characters ? hiragana, katakana and kanji ? and each group has its own history, function and style. Get your head around these facts and you will already know more than 99% of the people walking around with Japanese tattoos right now:

Hiragana 

These simple, rounded characters represent sounds, but have no independent meaning. They were developed by women in the Heian period and are still considered feminine by Japanese people.

Katakana 

Developed by Buddhist monks around the same time as hiragana, these are simple, angular characters that also represent sounds and have no meaning of their own. You saw them cascading down the screen in Matrix (although they were backwards!)

Kanji  

Originally from China, these characters are like pictures, representing a meaning and also several different sounds depending on the situation.

Designing with Kanji

Japanese Kanji Symbol Tattoo

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