As we told you yesterday, Ariana Grande sought to mark the success of her latest single, “7 rings”, by getting a Japanese-themed tattoo. Unfortunately, Grande flubbed the design; while the characters “七輪” translate to “7 rounds” or “7 wheels” in Chinese, the Japanese Kanji translation is “shichirin,” which means small charcoal grill.
After news of the tattoo botch went viral, Grande returned to the parlor in an attempt to clean up the translation. However, once again, she was unsuccessful.
As Kotaku explains:
Hoping to correct the “small charcoal grill” (七輪) kanji, Grande added the kanji 指, meaning “finger.” This addition attempts to turn the kanji 輪, meaning wheel or hoop, into the word 指輪 (yubiwa), meaning “ring” as in for a finger, and mitigating the BBQ kanji. However, the kanji 指 and 輪 are split into different lines, so it looks weird. In English, this would be like writing “rings” as “ri” and then “ngs” in another paragraph. Japanese kids are taught not to split kanji characters in school because it’s confusing. Now, you could split kanji for a stylized design, but that’s with correct Japanese, which her tattoo is not. Since the way that “seven” is written remains wrong, this is another bad kanji tattoo.
As such, Grande’s tattoo now translates to read “small charcoal grill, finger.” No, really.
In an Instagram story showing off her updated tattoo, Grande wrote, “rip tiny charcoal grill. miss u man. I actually really liked u.”
Little did she know that the Japanese word for BBQ very much remains present on her hand.
