People get tattoos for all sorts of reasons. Personally, I don’t see the point in getting a tattoo in a language and/or alphabet you don’t read, but whatever your reason-there’s no excuse to have something misspelled (in case you live under a rock, Hanjismatter is a site full of these. It’s reverse Engrish .)

So here’s a resource . Plug your kanji in and it’ll tell you what it means.

A friend of mine who speaks Japanese put in a sentence and learned a new idiom: 死んだ子の年を数える, which means ‘to count the years (age) of a dead child’, which is equivalent to the English/American idiom ‘to cry over spilt milk’.

That’s pretty … wow. (I like it.)