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I read recently that 30 is the new 20 and what better way to celebrate the paradigm shift than with a fine looking new piece of artwork on your body? This popular form carries with it the possibility however of mistranslation and possible misinterpretation. One should be very careful to select a message that reflects your true intentions and that the message is correctly translated into characters. It would be awful to have something so permanent inked into your skin that was not exactly as you had intended.

I have discovered that a great search term for locating characters on the major search engines is "chinese character dictionary." My search yielded a great number of sites that could serve as a starting point for searching for the terms I was interested in. Once I found the character or set of characters that made up the word or phrase I was going for, I would make a careful copy of it on a piece of paper and take it to my artist of local shop to render for me in a visually pleasing and stylized manner suitable for transfer to the skin. A good idea, once the design is finalized would be to take it to a friend who can read Cantonese or Mandarin and have them take a look at it to make sure it really represented faithfully the intended words or phrase.

I've read that some of the more popular phrases people have had done are things such as "Taming the tiger, defeating the dragon," "Wish I could be forever drunk and never sober" and "the way of the dragon is filled with danger" and "the sun will come out tomorrow." But of course, you might want to have a sentiment that is closer to your heart than a stock phrase. Once the message and design are completed, vetted by a competent reader or speaker of the language and ready to go you'll need to determine what colour ink to use. Many people choose black or some high contrast colour and you may also opt for some attractive shading or drop shadowing to make the design really pop and be sure to impress the viewer.

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