I found the Chinese character code in the European and American tattoo world and successfully deciphered it

This article chronicles a similar "codebreaker" experience that the author conducted alone. Obviously, I'm not an expert in this area, and I have used a lot of stupid methods in the process, which has led to many bumps into the wall. But perhaps out of selfishness, I still hope to share with you this process of gradually approaching the "truth" more completely, and also hope to pass on this pleasure of decryption to every reader reading this article.

This article will have more than 6,000 characters, more than 60 accompanying pictures, it may take 17 minutes to read the entire text, and a large part of it is spent on eliminating distractions. If you are only interested in new discoveries related to "Chinese character tattoo codes", welcome to read from the third part of the article "Starting from Chinese Tattoos, Approaching the Mystery of Garbled Codes".

I believe it may not make sense, but it must be interesting. Without further ado, the text begins:

As the "menstruation" section of the Chinese Internet, the collection of Chinese character tattoos for foreigners will always update your inventory when you almost forget them, and continue to refresh your understanding of Chinese.

Jokes like the one pictured above that are most often pulled out for group ridicule are the types that are most often pulled out.

But among these Chinese character tattoos, there are also some garbled tattoos that seem to be randomly arranged and combined of Chinese characters, which always puzzle me:

At first glance, most people may only think of them as some kind of global joke, subconsciously thinking that this is just foreigners being pitted by tattoo artists.

But are they really just a random patchwork of words?

I don't really believe that there are so many foreigners who would treat tattoos so casually as something that is likely to last a lifetime. There should be some kind of actual concatenation logic between those seemingly random Chinese characters.

More than once, I have wanted to delve into the mysteries of these "garbled Chinese characters", but due to the lack of opportunities and breakthroughs, the research progress has continued to be maintained in the "new folder" link.

Until recently, I swiped a help post on Little Red Book, but I didn't expect it to become the key to my deep puzzle.

The mystery of the "Fast Connect You Day"

Hurry up with you

Four Chinese characters that everyone who can recognize after attending primary school in China appeared in front of me in a new way in the post. WTF is it？

English acronyms? Hidden poems? Kanji homophony? Cantonese? Japanese? Google Machine Flip... I tried all kinds of ways to interpret it without success, and just as I was about to give up, an image in the comment section caught my attention:

This is not the first time I have seen this so-called "Chinese alphabet", but it is indeed the first time that I have successfully deciphered this seemingly irregular Chinese character cipher with it.

According to this alphabet check number, the English corresponding to "Fast Link Your Day" is "L-O-V-E", and combining the Chinese and English on this hoodie, you will find that the meaning it expresses is:

LOVE TOKYO – Love Tokyo!

It can also be deduced from this alphabet that the owner of the leg tattoo above is named: PAULO.

The result of deciphering the text shocked me, but it also made me wonder more: What kind of alphabet is this? How can you decipher Chinese character tattoo codes?

I immediately threw this alphabet into the image tracing website TinEye, and found that it first appeared in 2013, and the source was a tattoo content website.

Since then, the image has been reprinted by many other tattoo forums and information platforms.

And it's important to note that the "Fast Connect You Day hoodie" appeared in a help post from a Chinese blogger in Australia, and the "Das chinesische Alphabet" written on the Chinese alphabet is in German.

And when you Google "Chinese Alphabet," it appears on the front page. It shows that this misinformation has had a huge impact.

And as a very misleading source, cracking this Chinese character alphabet, is it possible to crack the Chinese character tattoo password of foreigners?

Unfortunately, the domain names of these tattoo information websites have expired, and I had to follow this clue to start a new round of search.

From searching for pictures to messing through various tattoo material websites, by the time I came to my senses, I found myself in a "maze of Chinese characters" created by foreign tattoo artists and Chinese learners.

The conclusion that can be revealed in advance is that in the European and American tattoo world, Chinese characters may not be the kind you know, and it has almost formed an independent text or pattern system.

Excluding those boring jokes in the machine-translated English translation, I tried to use my own classification logic to crack the aforementioned "Chinese character alphabet" as the ultimate goal, and carry out some irresponsible exploration and interpretation of the garbled Chinese character system in the European and American tattoo circles for follow-up research reference (non-serious research, welcome to discuss).

Cool Chinese characters are randomly combined rough solution

In the early exploration, I visited several European and American tattoo websites, read several oral records of the experience of tattooing foreigners with Chinese characters, and got similar results to most people's imagination:

Most foreigners who tattoo Chinese characters do not understand or want to understand Chinese, and most tattoo artists who tattoo Chinese characters do not understand and do not want to understand Chinese.

In this part of the unincomprehensible foreigner eye, Chinese characters are a cool symbol or pattern system - a single "symbol" can encompass the meaning of one or more words in English.

Tattoo one, cool; Tattoo a few, super cool.

As a result, on European and American tattoo material websites, you can often see the following Chinese character material libraries - they constitute the only perception of Chinese characters for most European and American Chinese character tattoo audiences.

The first type: positive energy Zen character collection

The foreigner who has tattooed this tattoo mainly draws a great fortune, a beautiful vision, and self-encouragement. Just like Chinese New Year's greetings with a whole string of juxtaposed auspicious words, the more buffs are stacked, the better.

Therefore, such a long string of Chinese characters should not be regarded as a complete expression.

The arrangement and combination of these positive energy Chinese characters and words, I think can be understood as each foreigner's own "eight honors and eight shames" and core values.

The second type: a collection of awesome characters

This tattoo refers to the Chinese characters in the font library, and the main highlights are buddy bull undefeated, sister is the queen slay full scene, similar to the high-frequency words in the lyrics of a special rapper.

And strung it together, the actual look and feel is more like the glory nickname of the king given by the primary school student who sang "Reverse War".

The appearance of Chinese characters alone is still useless, but the string formed by arranging and combining them is actually "crazy dragging cool cock to bomb the sky" in Chinese, and in English it is "Fxxking Amazing Swag Cool Dope Slay Lit" - do you say cool?

The third type: restricted character sets

Seeing these words, you can probably imagine the image of the tattoo holder.

This is a must-have tattoo for ruthless people in society, showing that Lao Tzu has not been messed with when he goes in, or don't come to piss me off The consequences are unimaginable, in short, it is rebellious and vicious.

In ancient times, there was a form of torture called tattoo punishment (also known as ink punishment), which is to tattoo the offender on the face, which is similar to this tattoo style.

The fourth type: middle two diseases also need tattoo character collection

As we all know, Japanese is derived from Chinese and still retains many Chinese characters. But in Europe and the United States, most people do not know the difference between the two, especially in the tattoo industry.

Therefore, in the Chinese character tattoo book, you can often see the mixture of Chinese and Japanese simplified and traditional Chinese characters. Sometimes the words in the same map are not even the same font.

European and American tattoo lovers, influenced by Japanese Chinese and Chinese kung fu films, have a soft spot for such words.

They will eventually pick a few kanji or kana with eye rims, and if they are not careful, they will not be right for the horse's mouth like the picture below:

Remember this picture, you will have to test it later

The above four types are some common routines for word combinations that I have summarized after reading countless Chinese character tattoos.

So far, I think I have crudely explained one of the reasons why foreign Chinese character tattoos are garbled.

Presumably you have already seen it:

When foreigners tattoo a string of Chinese characters on their bodies, they have a high probability that they do not consider it to be a complete sentence, but only as multiple juxtaposed words or a string of symbols.

So when you see this abstract tattoo on a foreigner, you can't even say that they are being pitted by a tattoo artist, because this is probably the effect they want to achieve.

And maybe you also found that in these garbled cool Chinese character combination tattoos, most of them come and go is just a few words.

The reason is also very simple, because in the reference table of Chinese character tattoo designs that can be searched on the Internet, it is indeed those words that come and go.

Studying this cool "list" of Chinese characters doesn't seem to make much sense, and it's drifting away from the mystery of Chinese character codes that I originally wanted to solve.

As mentioned in the first sentence, its real role is only to eliminate the distractions of garbled Chinese characters, so that we can officially begin to explore that mysterious realm——

The alphabet of Chinese characters in the European and American tattoo world.

Different from symbols and iconized Chinese characters, referring to the so-called "Chinese character alphabet" behavior can probably be considered to be "alphabetizing" Chinese characters.

And foreigners with "Chinese characters" tattooed on their bodies can easily think that their most common appeal is to write their names in Chinese characters.

In the following, we will start from the original motivation of "foreigners take Chinese names" and gradually approach the final answer.

Starting with Chinese tattoos, it is close to the gibberish mystery

In the era of QQ space and Renren, a large number of fabricated test questions have emerged on the Chinese Internet. For example, doing a few multiple-choice judgment questions can calculate your marriage, fortune, and so on.

Of course, you can also calculate the English name that suits you best.

Coincidentally, in the Internet world of other language regions of the world, there is no shortage of similar "Chinese name test generators". For example, the following website with a very "Chinese" color scheme:

According to my experiments, the best Chinese name for David Lee is "Liu Xiaofei" (don't ask me why, I don't know).

Boldly and irresponsibly guessed that some foreigners brought this Chinese name that they did not know how to calculate to the tattoo parlor, and then left such a tattoo:

Of course, not all foreigners who want to engrave their Chinese names on their bodies are fools, and many people still know that there is something in the world called "transliteration".

And many European and American tattoo parlors – just like when domestic attractions sell souvenirs with your last name on them – are already ready.

A casual search, you can find the following Chinese character name comparison table in many tattoo material websites:

This kind of comparison table is undoubtedly easy for foreigners to mistakenly believe that there are indeed letters in Chinese characters that are in contrast to English.

However, if you take the Chinese obtained by comparing the above table to the tattoo artist, it is really possible to get a Chinese tattoo that is recognized by the Chinese.

All of the above is easy to explain, but in the process of searching for "Chinese name-Tatoo" as the keyword, I also found a particularly peculiar Chinese character tattoo, which once puzzled me.

It has been seven or three feet in the inner part of the usu, and the three liters of the heart - it is difficult for Chinese to even pronounce this string of Chinese characters fluently.

When taken apart individually, these words do not seem to have a special meaning; And together, whether it is interpreted according to the pronunciation or as a complete sentence, it seems that it does not make sense.

What kind of name tattoo is this Chinese - I almost got stuck in this puzzle.

Fortunately, in the follow-up search, I found that in the world of tattoos in the English language area, there is also a rather "deviant" Chinese character alphabet, which corresponds to the above string.

At a glance, few people must be able to understand it at once. But what if I told you: to watch this picture, you need to forget the pronunciation and meaning of Chinese characters, and only look at the glyphs?

Yes, the creator invented this so-called "Chinese alphabet" using Chinese characters that resemble the 26 letters of English.

The image below is a complete example of this alphabet in 26-letter order. Just look at the glyph correspondence, assuming that you are a foreigner who does not understand Chinese, is it really possible to think that it is like that:

So, according to this alphabet, the two unsolved tattoos mentioned above can also be explained -

The owners of the two tattoos, one named Quintero and the other named Mehul. And in the tattoo parlor they went, the Chinese character reference pattern was the "alphabet of Chinese characters like English" above.

This alphabet, which is suspected to come from European and American tattoo circles, even reached the point of spreading all over the world with false rumors.

Some foreign netizens on social media said that their third-grade son once took back this form from school to learn to write his Chinese name.

At the same time, on the other side of the world, Japanese kana versions of English words are also gaining popularity:

Q: How do I understand this abstract letter? I think that's probably the confidence that native English speakers give them!

At this point, we have realized that there are indeed many so-called "Chinese alphabets" circulating in the world outside of China.

They are widely found in tattoo parlors and have influenced the perception of Chinese characters among some foreigners.

In addition to the ones mentioned in this section, there are a large number of strange "Chinese character alphabets" found on the Internet. And when I collected enough alphabets, I found that almost all garbled Chinese character tattoos can be reasonably explained.

But another series of questions arises: Where did these alphabets of Chinese characters come from? And how do they affect and penetrate the tattoo world?

Where exactly does the Chinese alphabet come from?

Anyone who has studied Chinese knows that Chinese characters do not have an alphabet.

But for a European and American person who has no contact with Chinese at all, they will most likely need a Chinese alphabet.

Because Chinese different from most languages in the world - pronunciation, glyph composition, meaning of individual words, all self-contained, the barrier to entry is extremely high.

When a native English speaker is ready to quickly understand Chinese characters, it is natural to find a Chinese alphabet according to the logic of his native language.

So, seeing this need—whether it was done by Chinese or foreigners, tattoo artists or people in the language training industry—the alphabet of Chinese characters in different shapes was created.

Therefore, in the European and American Chinese learning circles, there has always been a saying: There aren't alphabets in Chinese, but you can find plenty of them on the net. Chinese characters do not have an alphabet, but there are many online.

In an online environment full of lies, you may not imagine what kind of world a foreigner faces when he chooses Chinese character tattoo designs on the Internet.

When you Google "Chinese Alphabet", the results are not limited to Chinese standard Chinese characters, but also Japanese Chinese characters, Korean Chinese characters, Witoma Pinyin, and so on;

Bizarrely, these Chinese characters and pinyin can eventually be aggregated in the form of 26 letters and selected by Junjun.

So you spend a lot of time carefully selecting from these "Chinese character alphabets", and finally the tattoo artist tattoos you this pattern:

The above pile of so-called Chinese character alphabets is laid out so that everyone can experience what a complex maze of words is faced when a foreigner is preparing for a Chinese character tattoo.

For foreigners who do not understand Chinese, every step is a trap, and one wrong step will be branded for life.

At this time, we can conclude that the group of people who make up the "Chinese character alphabet" is the source of all evil caused by the appearance of garbled Chinese character tattoos like "Linji South Express".

But even knowing this truth, I still can't explain the Chinese alphabet corresponding to the "Linji Southern Express", how is it made?

The ultimate decryption of "Linji South Express"

First of all, I sincerely invite you to read the "Das chinesische Alphabet" mentioned at the beginning of the article.

In my previous search and reasoning, I excluded several of the bases for compiling the Chinese alphabet one by one—the meaning, shape, and pronunciation of the Chinese—and none of them seemed to be able to form a contrast relationship with the 26 English letters.

So, what is its codification logic?

After walking around the alphabet of various Chinese characters, I finally returned to the original picture and read the Chinese characters on the table word for word in order.

When I ignored the correspondence between Chinese characters and the letters ABCD, I found that the kindergarten Chinese characters on this alphabet were based on pinyin vowels and listed in the order of the first letters of "JKLMN".

Preliminary guesses are that this person can read at least some Chinese characters.

But why start with J and end with Q?

With a new basis for decryption, I began a new round of search and forensics. In this round of searching according to the diagram, I found that there is still a complete version of this so-called "Chinese character alphabet" -

When I traced the source of this image, I found again:

This seems to be an example diagram of the "basic characters of Chinese characters" of a foreign input method software, and most of the characters in the figure are indeed arranged according to the pinyin vowel vowel vowel and the order of ABCD English letters.

We are no strangers to the extended characters of this input method.

Roughly similar to the Chinese character input method made by domestic manufacturers, many also have the function of entering characters from other countries, but the input method and the integrity of the font library are not so exquisite.

Looking back at the example image of the input method, you'll also see that the compiler even thoughtfully marked the keyboard shortcut in the upper right corner of the character.

But this intimate shortcut key annotation is likely to accidentally become the ultimate source of "Chinese character alphabet" to spread falsehoods!

If you revert the whole process, I guess it would look like this:

A German friend saw the above example diagram of the input method on the Internet, and TA, who did not know anything about Chinese characters, was like a treasure, and excerpted the Chinese characters corresponding to the shortcut keys from capital A to Z, and finally made the widely circulated "Chinese character alphabet"!

Later, this alphabet was found by European and American tattoo artists on the Internet, and they did not know anything about Chinese characters, and they were like a treasure, and pasted it on the wall of the tattoo parlor.

Finally, garbled Chinese character tattoos such as "Linji South Express" and "Fastlink Your Festival" appeared!

The initial questions were answered, and the string of passwords was unraveled layer by layer, and of course I was very excited.

But what made me even more excited was that during the search, I discovered that I wasn't the first person trying to unlock this "Chinese character alphabet code."

Back in 2006, a blog site called Hanzi Smatter had already made efforts to curb the popularity of another "Chinese alphabet."

At the same time, their research also corrected a mistake I made in the previous classification.

The blogger (who should have been Chinese) called himself "Tian" teamed up with a professional Japanese-English translator named Alan Siegrist to research and refute the above "Chinese alphabet", and published their research results:

The original text is in English, and here is the Google Translate version

In 2021, another netizen named "Kunming2" (which should also be Chinese), corrected and completed the picture on Reddit, and further debunked the rumors.

So, the picture that appeared earlier (I thought it was just a random combination of cool Chinese characters) can actually be explained like this:

It is also possible that this old brother is actually tattooed with a name - Emilija.

Although this solution has been obtained and proven, it is a pity that neither the brothers a few years ago nor myself have been able to find the true source of this alphabet and the exact basis for its production. Now it can only be assumed that:

A foreigner who likes Japanese karate and Chinese kung fu culture selects a series of his favorite Chinese characters, and without knowing what exactly the basis is, summarizes them into a table, and then the latter is misrepresented as the Chinese alphabet, and finally engraved on the body of some big wrongdoers by tattoo artists.

You see, a string of Chinese character characters without exact basis, an example diagram of an input method, all have the opportunity to be made into a "Chinese alphabet" and circulated in tattoo parlors.

At the same time — just like U.S.-China relations — most of the Chinese character libraries on tattoo material sites popular on the extranet have not been updated or improved for more than a decade.

In this way, it is not surprising that foreigners can make so many abstract Chinese character tattoos.

You have to say that they didn't do their homework before the tattoo, they may have put in some effort; You have to say that these people are pitted, they are probably still proud of these Chinese character tattoos.

Limited cognitive levels often blind people's eyes, and what people easily choose to believe may just be a careless lie without brains.

This is the case with the person who compiled the Chinese character alphabet, the foreigner who credulously believes in the Chinese character alphabet, and the same with me who classifies the "Liulin Boxing Girl" as a "cool phrase".

So finally, if I had to give a piece of advice to foreigners who want to tattoo Chinese character patterns on their bodies, I can only say that learn from the following friend:

That way, at least when someone asks you about the meaning of your Chinese character tattoo, you can always be honest.