Kanji Tattoos

One type of tattoos that has been increasingly popular in the West in the past couple of years has been Japanese tattoos, and more precisely kanji tattoos. This has happened partly because of the fact that Japanese culture has started to become better known in the West thanks to art and media incursions like manga and anime. When we talk about Japanese culture it is important to note that although it has started to become better known in the West that does not necessarily mean that it is also understood and this is one aspect that is quite apparent when it comes to kanji tattoos.

First of all what many Westerners have to understand about kanji symbols is the fact that they represent a completely different way of approaching writing, most importantly is the fact that as opposed to most of the Western world that uses latin-based alphabets in which every symbol is a letter, kanji symbols represent entire words, usually more than one.

It’s important to note that although nowadays kanji symbols are strongly associated with a Japanese tattoo, in fact the characters are borrowed from the Chinese way of writing and as such one might consider his or her tattoo to actually be part of the Chinese tattoos trend.

Kanji tattoos have a definite hold on those Westerners who are more in tune with Japanese culture but also with the laymen as well because the kanji symbols are both artistic and they exude a certain air of oriental mysticism at the same time, creating a combination of ideal tattooing material.

A tattoo can mean many things to different people, however there are certain features that any tattoo has to fulfill, namely it needs to symbolize something, it’s supposed to have a certain meaning either to the wearer or to outside parties and ideally it should be mysterious in and of itself, and kanji tattoos tick all those boxes brilliantly.

The fact that kanji tattoos can express with only one symbol several things is indeed a great boon to those who are interested in getting a symbolistically charged image; one doesn’t need to tattoo or write three different words or images in his skin when an exquisitely and artistically beautiful kanji symbol can do that by itself.

There are many things that one can do with kanji tattoos, one can always get a simple kanji symbol like the flash tattoos one sees on the web or in tattoo parlors that will represent your name or a specific trait you identify with, or one can be bolder and start mixing kanji tattoos with other oriental themes like dragon tattoos and as such create whole new tattoo designs that are tailor made to fit one’s wishes.

Of course kanji tattoos lend themselves to being combined with tribal tattoos very easily since they both work on a more or less similar basis as far as artwork goes; a kanji symbol can be merged with tribal tattoos and made part of the overall design creating true pieces of meaningful art.

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