IT’S a rite of passage for many – getting a Chinese symbol tattoo, often while traveling or on a gap year.
But one woman was left stunned when she discovered that the inking on her foot – which she’d been told meant “love” – actually meant something very different.
Amanda took to TikTok to share a video of herself getting a pedicure, as she asked the nail lady exactly what the symbol represented.
And instead of love, it turns out it means pretty much the opposite.
Asking the nail lady to say once again what it means, she obliged and said, “Pain.”
She then demonstrated – crossing her arms and screwing up her face as if she’d been hurt.
The whole salon could be heard laughing, with the nail woman joining in and struggling to hold her giggling back.
“Turns out it means ‘pain’ or ‘hurt,'” Amanda captioned the video.
“Love how they are laughing at it,” one person commented.
As another wrote: “They did you dirty lmao!”
“I love how she laughed at and with you at the end,” a third said.
But others wondered how the error had actually happened.
“I check spelling a billion times in my own language before a tattoo, wouldn’t you be even more careful in another language???” one asked.
“Why do people get a tattoo in a different language and not check the meaning?” another questioned.
To which Amanda replied that it was a “valid question.”
“I’ll never understand why people get a language they don’t speak in a tattoo,” a third said.
“I would never get another language tattooed on me – for this reason,” someone else insisted.
Meanwhile, others used the comments section of Amanda’s video to reveal their own foreign language tattoo fails.
“I thought my Arabic tattoo said family, it means laugh,” one said.
“Omg my husband and I have matching ‘love’ tattoos we got together like 18 years ago and we still have no idea what it says to this day,” another admitted.
“I thought mine said ‘cheerful,’ it says ‘buoy,'” a third sighed.
“I have the Chinese for ‘pray’ on my stomach- my OBGYN laughed when he saw it and asked me if I knew what it meant,” someone else commented.
“I said ‘pray’ and he said ‘do you want to know what it really means?’
“Nope. No, I don’t!”
“I have one that is supposed to mean long life, and a Japanese liquor store owner laughed at me when he saw it,” another recalled.
Laughter could be heard throughout the salon too.