Symbolic tattoos should celebrate culture

I have a tattoo in Chinese hanzi, or characters. I studied Chinese for four years, and one year my class learned about idioms.

One of the phrases we learned meant “seeing is believing.” I adopted this saying as a personal motto, and since learning Chinese was important to me, I decided to get a tattoo of it.

There are people that get culture-based tattoos, like mine, because they think it looks “cool.” I do not agree with this. I got my tattoo because it means a lot to me, and because I appreciate Chinese culture a lot.

When people get either hanzi or Japanese kanji tattoos and have no idea what they mean, it takes away from the grace and beauty of the language. It’s unfortunate that people use them for decoration with little knowledge of their cultural significance.

Wendy Christensen from The Society Pages writes, “The fact that these tattoos, and countless more like them, don’t mean what people think they mean, illustrates the consequences of fetishizing aspects of a culture.”

Sometimes people have the impulse of getting a tattoo in hanzi or kanji because they like the way the characters look, but they probably do not realize that this can be disrespectful to the Chinese and Japanese culture.

Another disrespectful portrayal of the cultures is when people get tattoos of a person wearing their cultural attire. The person wears these clothes as part of cultural holidays or certain customs, and people just get them on their skin for decoration.

Getting a cultural-based tattoo completely defeats the purpose of what the culture signifies if the person does not understand it.

Tattoos are meant to spread the beauty that is forever etched on one’s skin, so getting something just because it looks cool can really belittle a culture and its people.