Tattoo Flash

You're really struck by the humanness of these objects.

You know, they're not really straightforwardly objects, they are pieces of people.

In 2009, Gemma Angel, then a graduate student, heard about a very unique opportunity.

The chance to study a set of 300 dried tattoo specimens.

Basically, preserved pieces of human skin with tattoos on them.

So creepy.

But Gemma was fascinated.

It's a morbid fascination.

There's something repellent about it, but also it draws you to it at the same time.

The skins are part of the Wellcombe collection, assembled at a time when criminologists were interested in exploring a connection between tattoos and criminal behavior.

Gemma applied for the position, and when she went in for an interview, a few of the tattoos were in clear boxes at the front of the room.

I just went straight over to the tattoos and started examining them.

I was so drawn to them.

The tattoos had supposedly been gathered between 1830 and 1829 in France, allegedly from criminals and sailors.

But no one knew exactly who the tattoos came from, or who'd collected them, or how.

And Gemma wanted to get as many answers as she could.

It's like being a historical detective.

Of the 300 specimens, which vary in size, subject, and technique, one in particular stood out to her.

It's an especially well-preserved piece of skin from a man's chest.

It has a large figure of a girl on it.

She has long dark hair, and she's staring back towards the viewer.

It's professionally applied, and the girl's face, though a little distorted, is enigmatic, even a little forlorn, her face resting on her hands.

Over the last century, criminologists have paid special attention to this tattoo too, theorizing about its meaning and writing about it into the late 1960s.

This girl is described as being his true love because she's positioned on his chest above his heart.

So the criminologist there is reading the body like a text.

But I always thought that that interpretation was not quite right.

So it's been kind of my mission, I guess, to reconstruct his story.

In order to learn more about this tattoo and all of the others in the collection, Gemma took a research trip to Paris where the tattoos had supposedly been gathered.

She was hoping to spot some similar iconography in one of the city's photo archives.

At the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, she started flipping through a book about French prisons.

And the moment that I

sort of turned the page and saw the photograph of this person in front of me, I just had this sort of like rush of shock and recognition.

And I just remember my heart pounding and just thinking, oh my God, it's him.

There was a catch, though.

There was no information about him.

No name, no face.

So she scanned the book and started sending the image around to curators and archivists.

She eventually heard back from the French police, who had the photo, which had been taken in 1901.

When I went to see the collection, so in the full photograph, he's sort of naked from mid-thighs to chin, and very annoyingly,

you can't see his face, and I still don't know what his face looks like.

But she now at least had his name, Auguste Fromand.

Fromand, it turns out, was a character who'd pop up in the French press precisely because of his incredibly elaborate tattoos.

In fact, he'd been photographed by the police so they could document his tattoos.

Many of them came from newspapers and magazines.

They were images that other Frenchmen at the time would have recognized.

He kind of becomes this walking kind of picture book of

images from popular culture.

But Gemma could not find a source for the image of the girl on his heart, the dreamy one who was maybe supposed to be his true love.

Or at least, not while she was in France.

One day, back in London, Gemma happened to be watching a documentary about the Victorian-era home.

As the narrator of this programme is talking about these infant milk formulas, and there are various images kind of popping up on the screen, and all of a sudden, this, just for a few seconds, this sort of print image, identical to this child tattooed on his chest, pops up on the TV screen.

I just remember leaping up and like scaring the life out of my partner and shouting, it's her.

The tattoo that had fascinated Gemma and other scholars, this mysterious, romantic, enigmatic image.

It's from an advertisement.

Auguste Froman's true love is a girl in an ad for Ridges baby food.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willip Haskin.

Time does funny things to everything, and especially to tattoos.

And in today's episode, we're going to be telling a number of stories about exactly that.

Stories like the one you just heard, which show us how a tattoo might mean one thing in one moment in time and something totally different in another.

Think of this episode like the walls of a tattoo parlor covered with a bunch of different tattoos, each with their own story to tell.

Decodering's producer Benjamin Frisch will be taking us through them one by one.

First, a journey into the world of a cartoon tattoo.

Then a story about a tattoo of a forgotten consumer electronic.

And last, a look at mistranslated Chinese character tattoos.

So today, on Decodering, a tattoo omnibus.

What has time done to these tattoos?

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There's a tattoo I've always been particularly curious about, and it's because, at first anyway, I hated it.

Back in the early aughts when I was in high school, I worked as a caricature artist at the European-themed amusement park, Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia.

It was my first real job, and I spent eight plus hours a day in 99% humidity in front of an easel, tucked away in corners of the park's various fake European countries.

Fake Scotland, fake Italy, fake Germany.

I drew all sorts of people.

A lot of kids playing soccer, soldiers in fatigues, retirees with their grandkids, and babies.

By the way, don't waste your money on a baby caricature.

Babies all look the same.

Because southeastern Virginia is so swampy and hot in the summer, guests dressed down.

There was a lot of shorts and tank tops.

So when people would sit down to have a caricature done, I'd see a lot of their tattoos.

This was the early 2000s, so there was a lot of Irish knots and so-called tribal designs.

But the tattoo that I noticed more than any other was of the Tasmanian Devil, the Warner Bros.

cartoon character who first appeared in 1954 as a foil to Bugs Bunny.

Taz doesn't look like a real Tasmanian devil, but he spins around like a tornado, leaving chaos in his wake, and he speaks incomprehensibly.

I could picture a Tasmanian devil on the calf of a man wearing cargo shorts.

Like, I feel like you would see this fairly often.

Today, Becky Drystadt is a character designer in animation, and she was one of my best friends when we worked together as teens at Bush Gardens.

I love Looney Tunes.

I love Bugs Bunny.

I have never liked the Tasmanian Devil.

There's just something about the Tasmanian Devil I just don't, I do not like.

Becky and I were in total agreement on this.

I liked Looney Tunes too, but to me, Taz felt like the epitome of a bad tattoo.

Corny, kind of corporate, and also aesthetically unappealing.

He's just kind of brown.

So I've always wondered why,

why were there so many tattoos of this one specific second-tier Looney Tune?

And yes, there really were so many of them, and not just at Bush Gardens in Virginia.

Did you have the Taz on the wall?

Oh god, yes.

Misha is a tattoo artist, painter, and graphic designer who started tattooing in the early 90s.

Today, she specializes in these incredibly beautiful, intricate tattoo cover-ups, but she cut her teeth doing the kind of ready-made tattoos you see on the wall of a tattoo parlor.

These tattoos on the wall are known as tattoo flash.

And by the 1990s, the Tasmanian Devil was a tattoo flash staple.

I had one day where I did five Tasmanian Devils.

I was working on one and somebody else like, dude, that's awesome.

I'll get it too.

And then two other guys were coming in to get a matching tattoo as buddies.

And they're like, yeah, we want that one.

I'm like, seriously, five in one day, one after another.

Julie Moon is another tattoo artist who cut a lot of Taz tattoos in the 90s while working in Boston.

Well, Taz was popular, but he was fairly boring in terms of color.

And I just thought putting him in different costumes would be really funny.

So Julie drew her own sheets of Taz Flash, softly rendered colored pencil Taz variations.

There's Christmas Taz with a Santa sack full of guts, a bright pink Taz as Cupid, a Warlock Taz, Fourth of July Taz, and another local variety, Taz as St.

Patrick's Day Party Animal.

But unlike other cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny, Betty Boop, or Woody Woodpecker, Taz was not always a tattoo icon.

It took decades for him to get there.

He was first introduced in a cartoon called Devil May Hare in 1954.

He's fully formed here, spinning around like a tornado, running down trees and boulders in his path with his trademark garbled speech.

He's trying to eat Bugs Bunny.

It really wasn't any groundspoil of popularity for the character.

He was just another crazy adversary for Bugs Bunny, really.

Jerry Beck is an animation historian and the author of multiple books on the history of animation, including Looney Tunes.

The character only appeared in like five cartoons.

These cartoons were originally shown before feature films and movie theaters, but the studio heads weren't super keen on Taz, so he never became a regular.

In some ways, I'd almost say the character was forgotten during the 1960s for the most part.

But Taz got a second life when those theatrical reels started to air on TV in the 70s and 80s.

I think the ensuing decades, the ensuing reruns of these cartoons, people think the character is there more than he is.

The popularity of the character began to snowball, and Warner Brothers began to notice.

In the 80s, they began heavily marketing Looney Tunes characters in a way they hadn't before.

By 1991, they had their own shops and malls.

They found out that Tasmanian Devil merchandise was really, really selling.

Taz is on t-shirts, mugs, and baseball cards.

And that ability he has to wear different costumes for different occasions and circumstances made him a merchandiser's dream.

He appears as an athlete in hip-hop getup and on so much St.

Patrick's Day swag.

By 1991, he has his own animated sitcom, Tasmania, featuring Taz as the brother of a Tasmanian devil family.

Tasmania ran for four seasons, and Taz continued to pop up in other properties, like Space Jam a few years later.

The character is toned down a bit from his earliest incarnations.

He's not just Bugs Bunny's enemy.

He's goofier, less scary, but he's still all id.

Uncontrollable, destructive.

He does what he wants.

A wild child.

So Taz was in the air.

But just because something is popular doesn't mean it's going to be a hot tattoo necessarily.

So why did people want Taz inked on their skin?

I think it has something to do with Taz being a wild child.

Rob Brucker was one, and he dreamed of getting a Tasmanian Devil tattoo since he was a teenager.

The Tasmanian Devil is like the wildest lunato.

The idea came in my head, once I turn 18, I'm to get sad to be a deal with a giant gun and I had zero weapon experience.

It's going to be awesome.

Rob joined the National Guard as a combat engineer right out of high school, just a few months before 9-11.

In 2004, his unit was activated to go to Iraq, and he was stationed at Fort Dixon, New Jersey, waiting to deploy.

They were doing field training.

getting dropped in the woods for a week at a time and basically just having to survive.

One time, a few guys in his unit said they were sick, so they got to hang back from outdoor survival training.

They snuck off base, went to a nightclub, and as they were coming home, the driver and the passenger got in a serious argument.

The argument was so bad that the passenger stuck a knife into the driver's stomach, and I mean, it was terrible.

It was a huge mess.

In response, the military brass locked down the whole unit.

I spent my 21st birthday locked in the barracks, not enjoying life.

A couple days before their deployment, still in lockdown, Rob and some other guys felt so cooped up they had to get out, blow off some steam, get up to some mischief.

They snuck out one night, found a cab, and told the driver to take them to the nearest tattoo parlor.

I was like, this is it.

This is my opportunity to get my Tasmanian devil holding an M16.

At first, the guy, he didn't have any Tasmanian devils on his wall.

So he told me he wasn't going to be able to do it.

But after begging him for a while, he came back, he drew something up real quick, drew it up, and I was like, I'll take it.

His new tattoo accompanied him to Kuwait and then to Iraq.

It wasn't a great time.

He remembers standing in a shipping container that had been converted into a latrine, looking at his tattoo and thinking about how he got it.

It was kind of like an anchor to him, connecting him to his past and to his potential future.

I will remember this forever.

You know, I'm going through this now.

I will not re-enlist

and I'll have a story to look back and laugh on.

After he finished his time in the Army, he moved around for a while and eventually landed back in Richmond, Virginia.

He has a wife and a kid and a mortgage payment now.

His Taz tattoo is a bit faded too.

All that sun in the Middle East probably didn't help.

But still, he loves it.

I never had any regrets when I was there.

I don't have any regrets now.

Do you still identify with like Taz as a character?

No, I'm older now.

You know,

I can't just go around YOLOing everything in life.

Rob made it very clear to me.

Taz is the wildest Looney Tune, the ultimate YOLO character, pure id.

He's the type that appeals to people who identify with the extremes.

People like athletes, bikers, St.

Patrick's Day party animals, and people in the military, like Rob.

And it's the Taz tattoos appeal to people in the military that I think helps explain why I saw so much of TAS as a teenager at Bush Gardens.

Though the TAS tattoo was common across the country, it was especially common where I worked.

Bush Gardens is smack in the middle of a region called Hampton Roads that's dense with military bases.

In fact, in 2018, 16.4% of the entire population of the area were military veterans, by far the highest in the United States.

And the park was always running discounts and free admission for veterans and active duty service members.

So, if Taz tattoos appeal to people in the military, and there are a ton of people in the military who live and work near Bush Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia, no wonder I saw so many Tasmanian devil tattoos.

I feel pretty satisfied knowing there was an actual explicable reason why I saw so many, but I also feel pretty bad now about how judgmental we were.

We really weren't considering how someone else's taste and life experience might differ from our own.

I worked through this with Becky Drystadt, my friend from Bush Gardens again.

It is easy to judge strangers and to just assume they're not putting any thought into it or like, you know, they're not getting it for the right reasons or whatever, but like, either way at the end of the day, it doesn't matter because it's not.

People can do what they want.

After talking with Becky, I think I figured out why specifically the TAS tattoo seemed so alien to me.

It's because I'm not a wild child.

I'm not the YOLOing through life type.

For most of my life, my world has consisted of doing work, making art, producing podcasts, all from the comfort of my laptop.

I am a cerebral, risk-averse indoor kid.

Taz was never, ever going to be for me.

So I wrote Taz off.

But I get it now.

Friends, go get your TAS tattoos.

I salute you.

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So for our next story, we're going to look at a tattoo of an electronic device that's just 15 years old, but that already feels like like an antique.

Behold, a tattoo of the Zune.

In 2006, the tech world was ready for a shake-up, and Microsoft was poised to deliver.

Last month, Microsoft finally came clean and confirmed its plans to release their own family of hardware and software products.

That's from the G4 tech program, Attack of the Show.

The Zune is getting the most buzz, and many critics are actually calling it the iPod Killer.

But could that really be true?

Are the days of the iPod numbered?

The iPod had first been released in 2001, and half a decade later had totally changed how Americans stored and consumed music, completely dominating the market.

The Zune was Microsoft's attempt to change that.

It looked, honestly, a lot like a Microsoft version of an iPod.

It had a big dial and screen and came in a brownish green.

It was well-branded, with a slick orange and fuchsia logo.

It had a buzzy mid-aughts tagline, welcome to the social, and it was relatively affordable.

Hopes were high and nowhere more so than on a community forum called ZuneScene, the online gathering place for people actively rooting for the Zune and for Microsoft.

Among those people was Stephen Smith under the screen name MS Zune fan.

I was actually a really big Microsoft fan.

I've actually beta tested like all the versions of Windows.

So I was like, I was just really all in Microsoft trying to support the Zune because they're going up against the Juggernaut.

Stephen desperately wanted the Zune to succeed.

And coincidentally, this is just when he was casting about for an idea for a tattoo.

I was like, I'm going to get a tattoo.

And I said, you know what?

Let me do the Zune logo because that was a neat design.

Stephen was visiting his parents at the time.

He left their house, found a local tattoo artist, paid him 50 bucks, and got the Microsoft Zune logo tattooed prominently on his left arm.

My other thinking was, I get some attention and you know try to help them out.

You know, soldier of the Zune army.

Let's crush Apple at their game.

He took a photo of the tattoo and posted it to the Zune scene forums.

Got a lot of response.

I got kind of a couple different actions.

I got shocked, laughed.

Oh, that's hilarious.

You're the King Zune fan at that point.

A lot of people thought it was fake.

They thought like I just drew a marker on my arm or something or photoshopped it.

It was so fun being the King Zune fan on the Zune scene forums that two weeks later, Steven got another zune tattoo this one on his right shoulder it's a line drawing of a man holding a rabbit and it comes from an animated zune advertisement he posted a photo of it to the forum too were you trying to impress the people on the forum yeah i'd say like you know i'd try definitely get a rise out of them just because i think that they would find it funny and like at most i expected it to kind of you know get a lot of attention on the community forum like on the zoom scene maybe a couple hundred talks back and forth about it

and then the photos photos started to circulate on the wider internet.

The technology blog Ngadget published a photo of Steven under the headline, What Kind of Man Gets a Zune Tattoo?

It's mostly just a photo, Steven's photo, the one he took up his first tattoo of the Zune logo.

It's a funny photo.

His expression is a little hard to pin down.

He's wearing a handlebar mustache, which is kind of silly looking, but his brow is furrowed.

The post ends with the line, is it just us or does he already look regretful about the decision he just made?

When I was seen like the Engadget article and it had like hundreds of thousands of views and stuff and like comments and I was like, holy,

like that was crazy.

Pretty quickly other blogs picked it up and it spread fast.

But what had been an in-joke on the Zune scene message boards looked a little different outside of it.

Less laughing with Steven, a little more laughing at him.

When Engadget discovered his second tattoo, they made a post in the same format.

The photo with the headline, what kind of man gets two zune tattoos?

It's at this point that I first heard about Steven's tattoos, and I, along with many, many others, wondered online, why would anyone do this?

Some reactions were more heated than others.

People were like legit mad at me and I'm like,

I didn't tattoo it on you.

It wasn't that big of a tattoo, so I didn't see the problem.

And they were just like freaking.

Part of this reaction was driven by the performance of the Zune itself.

You know, it ranks up there with the Edsel

as one of the most notorious ill-conceived product failures of all time.

Stephen Witt is the author of How Music Got Free, The End of an Industry, The Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy.

Nobody asked for it.

Nobody wanted it.

The closest thing I can think of as the equivalent to the Zune in the modern era would be the short-lived streaming service Quibby.

By mid-2007, retailers had sold about 1 million Zunes, according to Microsoft.

That sounds like a lot, but by contrast, Apple had sold over 100 million iPods.

Microsoft was clinging to an obviously failing product, but Steven was still committed to being its mascot.

To defy the haters, Steven decided to get a third Zune tattoo, this time of the Zune's tagline running over his left shoulder blade, Welcome to the Social.

And Gadget ran a post about it under the headline, What Kind of Man Gets Three Zune Tattoos?

Totally dumb tattoo.

I did it more as like a shock value against those people.

Did you feel made fun of?

I have a thick skin.

I'll just put that way.

When I was a kid, we moved a lot, like a lot, a lot, like.

more so than a human being should probably move.

And

on top of that, I've always also been a big guy my entire life, you know, fat and that kind of stuff.

So I can either cry about it and boohoo or develop a twisted sense of humor and make fun of myself and just develop a thick skin about it.

So I chose the latter.

Stephen took his thick skin and turned it into armor.

To most outside eyes, the Zune was a dead device walking.

But Stephen was the Zune guy.

That was his online identity.

And he was getting so much interaction, attention for himself and the Zune, so he kept looking for stunts.

Steven told me he got close to getting a Zune tattoo on his forehead, but he ultimately decided against it.

He consulted Microsoft to see if he could legally change his name to First Name Microsoft, Last Name Zune.

They told him, sure,

why not?

Like his other escapades, he posted this idea to the Zune scene forums.

It was picked up by Wired, garnering him some more press, but when he actually filled out the paperwork and took it to the judge, the judge said, what?

No way.

This is basically crazy.

It's what he said.

He goes, you have a lot of years left.

He goes, I don't want you to ruin it.

I was like, okay, you want to have a good point.

There were some other shenanigans.

Microsoft planned to fly him out to Washington to meet the Zune team and do some interviews for their internal TV channel.

But that too leaked.

And then Microsoft backed out.

They did send him a bunch of limited edition Zunes, though.

By 2010, it was pretty obvious that the Zune was a failure, and that was never going to change.

Interest in the Zune faded on all fronts, and even Steven finally got it.

By now, he'd covered up his Zune logo tattoo with an equally spontaneous tattoo, a drawing of Dick Cheney as the devil that a co-worker of his had drawn.

He still got the line drawing of the rabbit from the Zune ad, though.

Just looking at it, you'd never even know it was Zune related.

It's a real Ridge's baby food situation.

After the Zune hype settled, Steven would still get called up by journalists every once in a while, just to get his take on a Microsoft announcement.

He occasionally gets recognized in person, too, over a decade after the fact.

These days, Stephen is planning on covering up a lot of his tattoos to reflect his young daughter's interests.

He still loves the Zune, though.

At my wedding, I literally had a Zune doc with a Zune HD

and playlist that I made, like on display.

I had a little TV set up.

So it was like a part of my wedding, even.

If Steven had displayed this kind of devotion to a product now, he'd probably be able to to turn it into a career.

Back then, Steven's stunt made people angry.

But today, it might have bought him a few years as a Zoonfluencer, making money doing unboxings of sponsored products or interviewing Microsoft staff on YouTube.

Today, YouTubers getting stunt tattoos is a genre in itself.

On Twitch, there's a streamer that spins a wheel on his streams.

Sometimes it lands on a space that says he has to get a tattoo, and out comes the tattoo machine.

There's still Zune fans out there, too.

The Zune scene forums are no longer active, but there's now a makeshift replacement.

A surprisingly robust community on Reddit, where Zune fans work together to show off their devices, ask for tech help, and even in one case, show off their recent tattoo of the Zune logo.

On Reddit, this one-time laughingstock has become a genuine nostalgia object in a way way the iPod never could be.

It's the ultimate underdog and a reminder of a simpler internet, right before the iPhone, streaming, and social media revolutionized everything.

Steven's tattoos have taken on a nostalgic glow as well.

When he posted a thread to the Reddit a few months ago, the community was so happy to see him.

One user replied, Our Zune King still sits atop his throne.

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Our last story takes us to the present day to examine a current if fading fad: the Asian character tattoo.

In January of 2019, Ariana Grande released the single Seven Rings.

It was a hit, debuting at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, where it stayed for eight weeks.

To commemorate the song's success, Grande got a tattoo.

She got the words seven rings tattooed on her palm in Japanese characters and posted it to Instagram.

The characters she got literally translated to seven and rings, forming the word shichiren.

Idiomatically though, shichiren means something else.

A kind of small, portable, charcoal grill you might use to cook meat or fish.

Japanese literate Instagram followers quickly noticed, and the online reaction was swift and gleeful.

People went in.

One artist who goes by Arrigato Grande remade the entire Seven Rings video with an Asian cast with new lyrics about meat and grilling.

It also spurred think pieces.

This is from Inside Edition.

Grande is hardly the first English-speaking person to get a tattoo of Japanese or Chinese characters.

These sorts of tattoos have been a trend for years, which has led to a strange phenomenon: thousands and thousands of English speakers with tattoos that they don't understand.

Celebrities like Grande were the face of this trend, but what sustained it for so long are the regular people who got these tattoos.

In 1996, Mindy Bonner was one such person.

She was 20 years old and living in a small town in the middle of the cornfields of central Illinois.

It was pretty samey.

You go to church, you go to school, you go to work.

The first little act of rebellion was, I'm going to get a tattoo.

She decided to get a tattoo of a Chinese character.

It just seemed so exotic to me.

So

I went and looked at the wall and I found one.

He got out like a little sheet of paper to tell me what it meant.

And it meant immortality.

And I was like, oh my God, that's so cool.

That's the coolest thing ever.

It was her first tattoo, the first of many.

She'd eventually move away from her small town and come out as gay.

I think maybe the tattoos were part of that,

coming to terms with who I really was, saying, you know, I'm not like you guys.

I'm not like all of you.

And on a much deeper level with my own sexuality, no, I was not like you guys.

20 years passed.

She got a job in a pretty conservative office environment, so she kept her sleeves rolled down most of the time.

One day, they had some Chinese colleagues visiting the office, and she was showing them around.

It was hot, so Mindy rolled up her sleeves.

And my Chinese colleague looked at it and she started smiling and she's like, that's so cute.

And I'm like in my head, I'm like,

I didn't intend for it to be cute

when I was, you know, a kid when I got it.

And so I asked her, I go, okay, so

what does it mean?

Thinking, you know, I'm going to get.

back the response of what I've always thought it meant.

She goes, oh, that means fairy princess.

It's so cute that you would have a tattoo that says that.

I actually laughed out loud when she told me and she didn't understand.

She was like, well, what's so funny about this?

And so I explained the story to her and then we both kind of got a laugh out of it.

I guess it could have been something way worse.

I'll take fairy princess compared to what it possibly could have been.

How this fairy princess tattoo ended up on Mindy is the result of decades of cultural fascination, fetishism, confusion, and commercial exchange.

There's a centuries-long history between the West and Asia when it comes to tattooing influence, but the type of tattoo Mindy and Ariana Grande got began to appear much more recently.

After a loosening of restrictive immigration laws in the 1960s, there was an influx of Asian immigrants and a larger Asian influence on American pop culture beginning in the 1970s.

Richard Nixon's diplomatic visit to China in 1972 created a boom in Chinese cuisine after Americans witnessed the Chinese banquets broadcast on the news.

Kung Kung Fu films became wildly popular, and technology from Japan was booming with brands like Panasonic and Sony becoming ubiquitous in the United States.

These Asian Americans are coming in and bringing in the culture with them, starting businesses.

Ryan Takamiya is a writer and speaker on Asian American culture.

These factors came together to sort of give exposure to a culture that they hadn't had much exposure to at all before, and just enough exposure for this culture to still seem strange, exotic, and foreign.

Asian characters become more and more common in everyday American life, and they developed a sense of cool.

Over the next three decades, they would find their way onto t-shirts, band logos, and of course, tattoos.

By the 90s, they had become extremely popular, peaking around the year 2000.

One article from the Associated Press from that year spoke to an artist in North Carolina who speculated that these tattoos were making up a whopping 40% of the tattoo market at the time.

By 2001, Alan Iverson, Britney Spears, and countless other celebrities had them, and many were mistranslated.

Spears tattoo, for example, was supposed to mean mysterious, but instead just meant strange.

It's just after this early aughts boom that an engineering student named Tian Tong started a blog.

What percentage of these tattoos are just incorrect?

I was a 90%.

Tian's blog is called Hansa Smatter.

At the time, there was a lot of popular blogs dedicated to images from Asia of broken English, gathered for laughs.

Tian saw that he could provide the opposite service, and so he created a blog dedicated to translating these Asian character tattoos for non-speakers.

Essentially, a compendium of broken tattoos.

Just a tiny sampling of mistranslations he's featured.

Power pig, my abusive husband pimps me out.

Large domesticated livestock, real melon knows men.

And in one of the site's most infamous tattoos, one reading, crazy diarrhea on a lower back.

Although the owner of that tattoo would appear in the comments to say it was a joke, but intended it to be violent diarrhea, not crazy diarrhea.

So still mistranslated.

Sorta.

Still, at least those tattoos meant something.

Tian quickly noticed something even stranger.

Readers were sending in tattoos of multiple characters in a row that were meant to spell something out.

Oftentimes a word or their initials.

But it was always complete nonsense.

Chinese and Japanese do have phonetic alphabets in addition to their traditional characters, but that's not what this was.

This just seemed totally made up from whole cloth.

Still, he'd see many of the same characters repeating.

Eventually, he accumulated enough examples of these tattoos to puzzle it out.

A cipher, almost, to correlate the 26th alphabet with the Chinese character, which complete gibberish.

And then we have people using that to tattoo them on.

Tian and a translator friend finally cracked the code of what they called the gibberish Asian font and reconstructed it.

We were able to put the table together, sort of a matching English alphabet correlates the which Chinese character.

So we put it together and then we put on the website to tell people, please don't use this.

That this gibberish font was showing up so much means it must have been extremely widespread.

On the wall of the shop I worked in, A B C D E F G

all with a different

kanji over it.

That's the tattoo artist Misha again.

She remembers doing a lot of these tattoos in the early 90s, pulled from a sheet of flash.

Tattoo flash, again, is the art that often hangs on the walls of a tattoo parlor, giving patrons an idea of what kind of tattoo they wanted to get.

The Asian characters on this flash sheet corresponded to Roman characters, allowing you to supposedly spell out English words.

Needless to say, this isn't how language works.

Who knows what we were writing on people?

So we as Americans are playing decoder ring with it, you know, where we just assign a shape to a letter.

None of them were accurate.

So you've got a lot of people going around with tree, horse, lavatory.

But where did this flash come from?

Oftentimes, from a catalogue.

The badly translated ones, I mean, a lot of those come from commercial flash.

Dr.

Matt Lauder is a senior lecturer in art history and director of American Studies at the University of Essex.

If you were running a tattoo shop anywhere in the country and you wanted to offer these sorts of tattoos, what you'd likely do is order some tattoo flash from a tattoo supply company.

They were just sold and reproduced in their hundreds and thousands all over the world from the kind of 1970s onwards.

And

still today, actually, there are in-tatted studios.

This is as much a commercial story as it is an aesthetic one.

These tattoos were fast, typically used only one color, and so they were able to be offered cheaply.

No wonder tattoo shops and customers liked them so much.

So if that helps explain why these tattoos are so common and so mistranslated, what was the appeal in the first place?

Why was it so popular to get a tattoo you can't read?

What is mysterious and what is inscrutable has some sense of magical power attached to it?

Betsy Huang is an associate provost and dean of the college at Clark University, who specializes in Asian American literature and science fiction.

She pointed out to me that the fact that most Americans can't read these tattoos is not some weird side effect of the tattoo.

It's the whole point.

So you're choosing to express something about yourself without actually

using the language that everyone understands to say something about them.

So it's appealing to be able to simultaneously be transparent and hard to read.

If I got a tattoo with the Chinese word for family on my arm, I'm sending a message.

I've put something deeply sincere and revealing about my values as a person, presumably that I really value family as a concept, but I've applied it in a way that is also obscuring, because you can't read it.

Only I can decode it for you.

There's a power imbalance there.

It also creates a bond with people with similar tattoos, a way of signaling your taste, that you're part of the same club.

But for these tattoos to work as they are supposed to, to be mysterious and obscuring, they assume a certain kind of audience, one that can't read Chinese.

Everything energizing these tattoos falls apart when you're around people that can actually read them.

They assume a world where Chinese literacy doesn't exist, and by extension, a society in which Chinese people are not part of the mainstream.

These tattoos remind me of another early aughts obsession with language, one I mentioned earlier.

Some Some of the earliest meme material on the internet were the blogs that did the opposite of Tiantong's Hansa Smatter blog.

They posted images of poorly implemented English in Asian countries, like a construction sign that says erection in progress.

These images were mocked.

How could these foreigners make such basic, hilarious errors?

Shouldn't they know better?

How ignorant of them, how funny.

But these tattoos prove we were doing the exact same thing.

Perhaps we should have been looking in the mirror.

Artists I spoke to told me these tattoos are on the decline in popularity.

But that fact didn't stop Ariana Grande from getting her Seven Rings Charcoal Grill tattoo in 2019.

Within 24 hours, Grande went to fix her tattoo.

Upon consulting a Japanese tutor, she modified it, adding the character for the word finger to make it clear she was talking about rings and not grills.

She added the new character below the original tattoo, which due to the way Japanese syntax works did not solve her problem.

It just changed the meaning to Japanese barbecue grill.

Finger.

Maybe the most profound thing anyone told me about tattoos was something Dr.

Gemma Angel said.

She's the person you heard at the top of the show, who studied the preserved tattoo skins.

Today, she's a lecturer and program director for the MA program in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester.

This is the thing about tattoos are kind of they're connected by temporality, aren't they?

So that they are a reminder of something

that's gone, but they're also permanent, so there's a kind of paradoxical aspect of them.

Technologies of memory, I guess you could say.

We spend so much time talking about the material permanence of ink embedded in skin, that tattoos are forever.

But just because a tattoo is fixed on your skin does not mean its cultural meaning is fixed too.

In the long run, tattoos can read as something the person wearing them never imagined.

In the case of Gemma Angel's tattooed skins, some of them are so far removed from us in time, they are almost pure mystery.

In the same way the Chinese character tattoos meaning has shifted from something cool and mysterious to something more questionable, so too has the the Tasmanian devil.

He's less a modern symbol for party animals and more a throwback to the wilder youths of people like Rob Brucker, who've aged out of YOLOing through life.

And the Zune, a symbol of technological hope for people on the Zune scene forums, became a symbol of failure, only to become a nostalgia object on Reddit.

Just as a tattoo may blur with age or fade from too much sun, so too does the cultural meaning of a tattoo become obscure with time.

Over decades and centuries, all tattoos might become as inexplicable as a girl in a baby food ad.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Benjamin Frisch.

You can find me on Twitter at Benjamin Frisch, F-R-I-S-C-H.

A very special thanks this episode to Dr.

Matt Lauder and Carmen Neeson, who were instrumental in orienting us on this episode.

Also, thanks to Brett Lemoyne, June Thomas, Mike Hallman, Asha Saluja, and Jonathan Shaw.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed and Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written by Benjamin Frisch.

It was edited by Willip Haskin.

Decodering is produced by Willip Haskin and Benjamin Frisch.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

If you would like to become a Slate Plus member, please go to slate.com/slash plus.

Otherwise, we'll see you next week.

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