I am considering getting a tattoo that will represent my love and committment to the aspects of Kung Fu (and martial arts in general), and to concepts and life-principles in general. I did a search, but could not find any relevant posts. My top pick is a rather striking pose of General Kwan with a kanji phrase below it. I would rather not reveal the phrase itself at this time. If I go ahead with it, I am considering it on my right upper-shoulder.
Anyhow, a few questions:
Can you post pictures of your Kung Fu or martial arts tattoo?
Did you have any problems immediately after getting it since, after working out, we sweat so much? Plus rubbing of cloth to skin?
Anything else you would like to add to the discussion, feel free.
Q. Can you post pictures of your Kung Fu or martial arts tattoo?
A. Yes. I posted pics of my Celtic tats a couple of months ago.
Q. Did you have any problems immediately after getting it since, after working out, we sweat so much? Plus rubbing of cloth to skin?
A. It’ll bother you for about a week, itching and whatnot when you sweat, but you should be fine as long as you keep it clean and keep a nice layer of A&D ointment on it. You can’t go swimming for a couple of weeks after, but showers are no problem.
Make sure the person putting the characters on understands how the character looks… I’ve seen my share of people with characters upside-down and sideways because neither them or the artist knew enough about characters.
Heh. I should have been more specific. It will indeed be traditional chinese calligraphy. I suppose I made the error in being too general…or japanese specific.
Just make sure that they will do free touch up work for up to a month afterwords. I have a tribal/zodiac in between shoulderblades that needed to be touched up twice. It’s nice and black now but I would have been PO’d if I had to pay for the two extra visits.
Well, Kwan Dao forms are cool and he certainly is the Patron God of War…but that really doesn’t have anything to do directly with my choice, interestingly enough. I like some of the ideals he represents:
Strength
Integrity
Honor
Perseverence
Patron of Martial Arts
to name a few.
The only pics I can find on this pc at work of my tattoos are these two on my right arm… The dragon head I drew up and to tell you the truth I wish I wouldn’t have gotten it where I did… Being I’m really into iron arm training and took pride in how hard my arms were, that spot on the boney part of the arm is super sensitive now. Direct hits are fine but slaps feel like slapping sun burn all the time. The mantis is fine on the wrist side, but that outside one is a tough one to deal with… I’ll put up the pics of my other mantis stuff when I get home tonight and can pull it off of that pc. The legs and upper arms I didn’t have a problem with while training. Accept for the right leg that goes up to the knee on the outside was having a hard time healing because the skin was wrinkling from bending the leg. So after I had it touched up I had to walk around stiff legged as much as possible. So think about that when getting anything around bendy parts that the skin wrinkles up.
We ran an article on Kung Fu Tattoos way back in our July 2000 issue. In a sidebar at the end, we asked for readers to send us pics of their martial tattoos. We were hoping to get enough to do some sort of artsy layout thing but not enough were sent (and the ones that were, were ugly). We’re still open to the idea. Maybe it could happen now from the web. Are you interested?
I was told recently before i got a sleeve and shoulder tattoo of a Japanese Yakuza Looking dragon holding onto the pearl. I added the character for Dao inside pearl. The dragon is the keeper of the dao and im a daoist so i like the tattoo i got, also dragon represents alot of other spirital things for me.
Anyway i was told by an old chinese guy that people shouldnt get dragon or dieties on the body because they will be cursed and will walk the earth as a wandering ghost after u die.
I read an article on the internet years ago about getting kanji or Chinese character tattoos. It said to get someone who is familiar with how the character looks, and made special mention of the “white space” or something in the character, like the little streaks of white that are left in the character from the brush. I don’t remember exactly.
And then there were the articles about the girls who asked for the kanji for “girl power” or something and instead got “I’m a wh0re” in kanji from a disgruntled Japanese tattoo artist who was sick of white people getting kanji tattoos.
But see if you can find that article about the white space. I think it gave the Japanese name for that term but I can’t recall it off the top of my head. Sorry.
