Bad Hebrew Tattoos.

I spent a fair portion of Thursday at the AdTech trade show. While I was there, I saw a person with Hebrew lettering tattooed on his forearm. The tattoo consisted of three words, and while the lettering was clearly Hebrew, I couldn't make out the words.

Then I realized what I was seeing -- the tattoo was backwards!

Once I realized that, I was able to read the first two words -- Elo-(h)-im Shel -- but I still couldn't make out the third word.

You might think that bad Hebrew tattooing doesn't happen very often -- but you'd be wrong. There is, in fact, a blog dedicated to bad Hebrew tattoos -- which includes misspellings, horrible transliterations, backwards words, incorrect (or nonsense) words being used, and all other sorts of possible errors. You'd think that if you were going to go to the trouble of having a foreign word permanently tattooed on your skin -- and (because more often than not when Hebrew is used it has a religious theme) it has some deeper meaning for you, you would double and triple check to make sure that everything is correct.

I considered telling the guy at the show about the tattoo, but then decided against it. I figured that one of the following were probably true:

1. He already knew about it.
2. He didn't know about it, but neither did anyone he hung out with.
3. He didn't know, but since it was done already, there was no point in making him feel bad about the mistake.

The Wolf

UPDATE: A little research has turned up what has to be the worst Hebrew lettered tattoo of all time -- the one belonging to Danielle Lloyd.