Red & Black

Ryan emailed me this morning after he saw an article about my site in the newspaper. He said the translations of his tattoos were given to him long time ago, he still wanted to verify to see if they are correct or not.



In his email, he has mentioned that the center set of four black characters with red outline 士小王玄where chosen solely based on their looks; therefore I will only focus on the rest two sets of tattoos.

Ryan was told the set of red characters meant “samurai/warrior and something else”. Due to their poor qualify, the two kanji characters looked like either 丈夫 or 大夫.

丈夫means “hero; gentleman; warrior; manly person” in Japanese, and “husband” in Chinese. 大夫 means “high steward; grand master” in Japanese, and “doctor” in northern part of China.

I don’t know what those three red katakana キソグ (or キング) meant, except phonetically they are “ki-so-gu” (or "ki-n-gu", aka "king").

He was also told the set of black characters meant “bitter and sweet/kind”. I did recognize 苦 as “bitter; hardship, suffering”, but I had trouble trying to figure out the three katakana below.

ジヨイ, “ji-yo-i”, perhaps “Joey” "joy"?