Tag Archives: tattoo

Spiral Lord’s Prayer Tattoo Kit

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In the next few days, Aramaic Designs.com will be releasing a Spiral Lord’s Prayer Tattoo Kit, which will be made up of the following:

  • A tattoo stencil of The Lord’s Prayer in Spiral (in the correct form and order!)
  • A translation key and pronunciation guide of the Prayer so you know what it says, where it says it, and how to say it.
  • Instructions for you and the tattoo artist for how to size the tattoo stencil properly for your arm.

And we’re still working on some of the details. If anyone has any ideas, please feel free to post them in the comments section here, or email them in to Information@AramaicDesigns.com.

Peace,
-Steve

Ricky Martin’s Mistaken Assyrian Aramaic Tattoo

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UPDATE: Since the publishing of this article, Aramaic Designs now offers a Spiral Lord’s Prayer Tattoo Kit. 🙂

Well, it just goes to show you that when you take your time and look over something carefully that you do a better job at spotting things that are out of place. Thus is my plight with Ricky Martin.

Just the other day, a potential client asked if Aramaic Designs could completely replicate Mr. Martin’s Aramaic tattoo of the Lord’s Prayer. I furnished a quote and sent it over for approval, but in the meantime I went to work to research this particular design to see what it was all about (as preemptive research is one of my favorite hobbies). I, like many people, have seen pictures of it before, and whenever I gave it a cursory look over it seemed very well done and I could easily read snippets of the prayer around the spiral.

I’ve enhanced the above image to make it more readable.
Also this image, as a subject of criticism, is being used under the doctrine of Fair Use.

Then I tried to read over all of it from start to finish… Which is where things started to get weird.

This is what I was able to read from the above image after I enhanced it, starting at the bottom left and winding all the way to the “Yah” ligature in the center:

‘aykanâ‘ d’âf hnan (this portion I could not make out) : hav lan lahma’ dsuwnqânân yaumanâ‘ : malkuwthâkh nehwâ‘ çevyânâkh ‘aykanâ‘ dvashmayâ‘ : ‘abwun dvashmayâ‘ nethqadash shmakh te’the‘

This translates into the following and I kid you not:

Also as we (the same portion I could not make out) : Give us bread of our need today : Your kingdom may your will be done like which is in heaven : Our father who is in heaven may your name be holy she will come.


Although the individual chunks of text came verbatim from the Syriac Peshitta, they are completely out of order and using a bit of forensics (“source criticism” if you will 😉 ), I can immediately see what caused this tragedy: Whoever arranged this tattoo did not take into account that Aramaic is read from right to left.

Argh!!

Allow me to illustrate exactly what happened. Let us say that our tattoo designer came across the following text in this format:

Our Father who art in heaven hallowed by thy name thy kingdom
come thy will be done on earth
as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread
and forgive us our trespasses …

They then took each line of text and connected them in the wrong direction, resulting in:

And forgive us our trespasses as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread come thy will be done on earth our Father who art in heaven hallowed by thy name thy kingdom

The bigger tragedy is that this could have been completely avoided.

Several notes to go over:

  • The symbol in the center is a Yod-He ligature (“Yah“) which in the Syriac tradition is a shortened form of the Tetragrammaton that symbolizes the Trinity (hence the three dots on top, one on the bottom).
  • The reason the spiral trails off in “she will come” is because the Aramaic word te’the‘ (i.e. the “she will come” in question) is referring to “your kingdom” or malkuwthâkh whose grammatical gender is feminine. If it were not obvious what the subject of the clause was, due to ambiguities in Syriac grammar, te’the‘ could also translate as “you (masc.) will come.”
  • This only proves once more that if you are going to get a translation done, please trust a professional for both layout and the actual translation, itself. I’ve already done a few posts here (1 2) on The Aramaic Blog about mistaken tattoos, and if you don’t believe me, there are other websites that have examples as well. In fact, don’t just trust a professional, once you’ve obtained a translation have it double-checked with another professional source for accuracy before you even think about permanently affixing it on your skin. (For example Aramaic Designs will double-check translations pro bono.) Laser removal procedures are extremely unpleasant.
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UPDATE November 2012:
For those of you who are interested in how The Lord’s Prayer looked like and sounded like back in Jesus’ time, I have posted my reconstruction of The Lord’s Prayer here:

The Lord’s Prayer in Galilean Aramaic on AramaicNT.org.

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Bad Hebrew/Aramaic Tattoos Part 2: Right-to-left Support

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Surfing the web I came across yet another problematic tattoo:


The text on the bottom is apparently supposed to read יהוה (the tetragrammaton, Yahweh, Jehovah, however you wish to refer to it as). It is backwards.

I believe that these persistent problems (see the original post Bad Hebrew/Aramaic Tattoos) are due to people not having right-to-left (RTL) support installed on their computer systems. This is because with the Unicode standard, RTL text is stored in a computer as a string of left-to-right characters by default leaving it for the computer program to decide how to display it.

Language support test:

שלמא עמכון

The first line of text above is an image of how things should look for the phrase shlama `amkun (peace be with you), where the bottom line is how your computer renders it using Unicode. If the above two lines are identical in direction, then you have RTL support working. If one of them is the reverse of the other, or you see a bunch of question marks, boxes or gobbildygook (known as “mojibake“), then you don’t have it installed.

If you are one of the unfortunates who do not have RTL, allow me to explain how one can ensure that their computer will display Hebrew and Aramaic letters in the proper direction.

If you’re using an Apple computer with Mac OS X 10.1 or later, congratulations! You don’t need to do a thing for Hebrew or Arabic. They’re already set to go. If you would like to display Syriac characters, however, the direction is correct, but the only drawback that you’ll come across is that Syriac-based scripts will not display the proper character forms. You can get around this by using this nifty word processor called Mellel which ensures that Syriac displays properly.

If you’re using Windows XP, then things are a bit more tricky. You’ll have to dig up your system install disk and follow the instructions posted on Micro$oft’s website: http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/handson/user/xpintlsupp.mspx.

I have yet to touch Windows Vista with a 10-foot pole, so I am not sure as to the state of Hebrew/Aramaic and Syriac support. If someone could leave a comment about it I would be much obliged.

Several Linux distributions have native Hebrew and Syriac support, but generally I’ve noticed that people who use Linux as their everyday operating system can figure out how to switch things on without help. 🙂

If you’re using an operating system older than the ones that I’ve mentioned (Mac OS 8/9, Windows 98, etc.), upgrade. Unfortunately, ancient languages are the youngest additions to operating systems. For example, Phoenician has recently been added to Unicode 5.0 and support for it is still young and prone to glitch.

Again, even with this in mind, I must stress:

  1. Don’t trust a tattoo gallery website. – A professional (preferably fluent with languages that are not dead or near-dead) translator with a good, strong record is the only way to go. That way, you can trust that you are getting something appropriate. The above image was found on ReligiousTattoos.net which has a big blaring disclaimer not to trust anything posted there.
  2. Get an image of the text. – Don’t rely upon your computer to display a font properly. Remember that even if you have proper RTL support installed that there are other problems with encoding, such as mojibake.
  3. Always always always always get a second opinion. – “Measure twice, cut once” the old proverb goes (and for a reason). Always take the time to double-check the text before getting things inked. With things such as dead or nearly-dead languages this can be difficult but not impossible. For Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic, check your local synagogue. For Syriac, track down a Syrian or Assyrian church. For Sanskrit, a Hindu temple or Buddhist monestary. If all else fails, go to your local College or University, and poke around the religion and linguistics departments. If you explain why you want your translation doublechecked, they will sympathize. 🙂 Aramaic Designs will double-check your Aramaic translations for accuracy pro-bono.

Peace,
-Steve

Bad Hebrew/Aramaic Tattoos

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A while back, Codex (the blog of Tyler F. Williams, the Chair of the Religion & Theology Department and Assistant Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Taylor University College in Edmonton, Alberta… whew what a run 🙂 ) did a both hilarious and sad (and hilariously sad) study on mis-translated Hebrew and Aramaic tattoos.

Well, guess what?

They keep happening!

I’ve come across two more:


The passage below is supposed to be taken from the Hebrew of the Song of Songs “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”

It is backwards. It should read:

אני לדודי ודודי לי
Ani ledodi vedodi li

Jesus appears to be scowling in disapproval.

Additionally this tattoo is on the arm of a man. “Dodi” is the masculine form of “beloved” so this backwards text, even when corrected means “I am my beloved’s (masculine) and my beloved (masculine) is mine.” Perhaps the bearer was trying to refer to Jesus? If so that would make sense. If they were referring to their sweatheart… not so much.

As if this one was bad enough, it looks like someone copied it for this tattoo:

Again backwards, and wrong gender.

If you are thinking of getting a tattoo, I cannot stress enough how serious such an endeavor is. I have helped over 300 people get tattoos done in the last year as a translator, and when you decide to get a translation done I recommend that you strive for the following:

  1. Don’t trust a tattoo gallery website. – A professional (preferably fluent with languages that are not dead or near-dead) translator with a good, strong record is the only way to go. That way, you can trust that you are getting something appropriate. The above two images were found on ReligiousTattoos.net which has a big blaring disclaimer not to trust anything posted there. This didn’t seem to stop our friends.
  2. Get an image of the text. – Don’t rely upon your computer to display a font properly. What had probably happened with the above examples is that their computer did not display Hebrew Unicode in the proper right-to-left format. Also, other problems with encoding can happen, such as mojibake.
  3. Always get a second opinion. – “Measure twice, cut once” the old proverb goes (and for a reason). Always take the time to double-check the text before getting things inked. With things such as dead or nearly-dead languages this can be difficult but not impossible. For Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic, check your local synagogue. For Syriac, track down a Syrian or Assyrian church. For Sanskrit, a Hindu temple or Buddhist monestary. If all else fails, go to your local College or University, and poke around the religion and linguistics departments. If you explain why you want your translation doublechecked, they will sympathize. 🙂 AramaicDesigns.com will double-check Aramaic tattoo translations pro-bono.
–Steve Caruso