ARTICLES

Bad Hebrew Lettering Tattoos

By Ben Mordechai

Getting a Hebrew lettering tattoo or any tattoo for that matter on one's body is a very serious matter that should demand serious deliberation well before the tattoo-machine's needles ever touch the skin. After all, a tattoo is permanent, literally, and a tattooed mistake is with a person for life; because tattoo removal is not yet an exact science.

Getting a tattoo in any foreign language comes with a certain amount of risk because it is a foreign language that may have multiple meanings. Bad Hebrew lettering tattoos are either the fault of the wearer because s/he did not research their design / text properly and as a result of which, they ended up with incorrect Hebrew or worse or the fault of the tattoo artist because s/he did not execute the tattoo professionally. In order for anyone to get a tattoo there are a logical set of steps which should be done by anyone considering getting a tattoo, which will be discussed in another article "How to get your Hebrew tattoo".

Here is an example of a tattooed blunder, the tattoo in the photo on the left is likely supposed to be the word Chai, which means life in Hebrew. The letter on the right is supposed to be the letter Chet...but the letter Chet in the photo is not a Chet but rather the letter Hey. What this means is that the word Chai is incorrect and spells Hi ...as in hello, but there is no such word in Hebrew as Hi. Therefore this tattoo qualifes as gibberish. The closest idea that we could offer this poor girl and her Hi tattoo is to just connect the leg of the letter Hey to the body in order to make it a Chet. But then again, maybe she deliberately wanted the word Hi on her lower back so as to be friendly?