Chinese Tattoo Symbol - Translate Your Words

I've seen a lot of people, including famous ones like David Beckham, wear Chinese calligraphy on their bodies. It seems that if you have a Chinese tattoo symbol on your arm, shoulder blade, wrist, or wherever else you'd want a tattoo, you're considered popular. Well, I can't blame them, especially Westerners.

There's a certain mystery enveloping the beautifully complex Chinese characters. The fact that a lot of people don't know or aren't familiar with the meaning of these characters attracts more attention to the person wearing the tattoo. One can't help but wonder what those characters mean, and what relevance those meanings have for the person who wears them.

The top symbols that are used for tattoos are the symbols of the Chinese zodiac and the symbols for love, strength, faith, friendship, family, happiness, peace, hope, and lastly, luck. These choices reflect what people desire for themselves, for their lives, or what they believe best reflects their personalities, narrates their experiences, or asserts their identities. These are one of the perks of having a Chinese tattoo symbol and it can make you wonder why the Chinese or most Asians themselves don't have them.

Well, try imagining that you're a native English speaker and you have the word "love" tattooed on your arm. Some fancy having a dragon tattoo and having the Chinese character for dragon tattooed alongside it. It's like having a picture of a dragon labeled "dragon". Chinese and Asians usually prefer to have tattoo symbols of animals or flowers.

A Chinese tattoo symbol used as a tattoo can either be Chinese calligraphy or Chinese writing. This is an important consideration since there is a difference between the two. Chinese calligraphy is not just words or writing; it depicts emotion, mood and thought, and can be as much a picture as words, so that it would be best, aesthetically speaking, to choose Chinese calligraphy over Chinese writing. One site gave seven kinds of Chinese calligraphy, two of which are used as tattoo designs -the Kaishu style (or the formal or regular style) and the Lishu style (or the official clerical style).