Thursday, April 29, 2010

Tatoo Speling

Nobody’s perfect. We all make mistakes. But thankfully, our mistakes don’t always have permanent consequences.

Unless, of course, we’re talking about tattoos, which are pretty, you know…permanent.

You may have read a recent piece in the Chronicle Herald, which told the tragic tale of a local tattoo artist, an unhappy tattoo customer, and a lawsuit.

It appears that this customer had requested a tattoo on her arm which was to read “You’re so beautiful.”

Unfortunately, both the tattoo artist and the customer seem to have been a bit spelling-challenged, and the tattoo, when all was said and done, actually read, “You’re so beatiful” (sic).

Wouldn’t you just kick yourself? I do have to give these two individuals big points for getting the “you’re” right, though, because I would have thought that it was the more difficult word in that sentence, spelling-wise. But all criticisms of why someone would want that particular sentence tattooed onto her person aside, we have to admit that a misspelled tattoo is a very big problem.

Regrettably, it’s not an unusual problem. You don’t have to dig very deep into the wonders of the world wide web to find other examples of tattoos gone horribly wrong.

For example, one young gentleman with particularly healthy self-esteem (apparently, much like our unfortunate local lady) had the following words tattooed in a lovely, ornate script, right across his back: “I’m awsome.” Another, rather optimistic tattoo lover had these words indelibly etched into his wrist: “Tomarrow never knows.” And a lover of the theatre, one must assume, had the famous smiling and frowning masks inked into his or her skin, with the words “comedy” and “tradgey” loving spelled out above each one.

That IS tradgic. Perhaps more tradgic is the realization that expensive, protracted and painful laser treatments are about the only way these people will ever erase these little oopsies. “To young to die, to fast to live” reads one young man’s arms. To bad he was in to much of a hurry to consult with someone about those tricky missing o’s.

Remember that “you’re/your” point I made a moment ago? I’ve found at least five examples of that particular apostrophe error implanted into the skin of various folks, all of whom have some sort of point to make about what you are or should be doing in relation to them. One young tough has these tender words tattooed across his knuckles, just to let us know a bit about the type of gentleman he is: “your”/ “next”.

Perhaps the lesson here is that some tattoo artists may have actually become tattoo artists because they are excellent at visual expression, but they aren’t all that keen on, you know, words, and writing and stuff. And that maybe the cool kids should just run their ideas through a spell-check or something, or maybe have a teacher or someone’s mother do a quick-double-check before the needle goes in.

Maybe our local woman’s lamentable experience can serve as a teaching moment for other tattoo seekers. Heaven knows, none of us would really want to be in her position – stuck with an ugly tattoo that was supposed to proclaim to the rest of the world just how “beatiful” we are.

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