• Rhaedas
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    fedilink
    1010 days ago

    The important thing is to know what it actually says. Outside of that, Chinese and other type writings are artistic in themselves already, so even if it only said “water”, if that looked nice why not?

    This picture shows that artistic character. If her back had the meaning tattooed in English it might get some odd stares. Unless it was in Papyrus font.

    • @ylph
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      710 days ago

      It might look artistic to you, but to a Chinese reader this example looks basic and dull, so they just see the meaning of the words much the same as the “WATER” on the left. There just isn’t any real aesthetic or artistic value here, in the context of Chinese writing.

      It kind of goes both ways though, back in the day there was a fad in Asia too of people wearing clothes with random English words on them, because there those looked exotic and cool, even though to Westerners it looked a bit dumb.

    • mommykink
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      English
      610 days ago

      Yeah really, it’s like these people have never heard of calligraphy.

      • @[email protected]
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        fedilink
        210 days ago

        More likely that finding someone in the west competent enough to do calligraphy is a lot more uncommon, and if for people who never see the characters they all look exotic, so the basic font is good enough for them. At the very least the tat in this pic doesn’t seem to be fucked up (mirrored, missing radicals, etc) or using the fake font to “mimic” the latin alphabet.