There is nothing pop stars love more than dabbling in cultural appropriation, but this week Ariana Grande found out that if you’re going to appropriate you should at least do it correctly. The singer posted a photo of a brand new Japanese tattoo in Japanese, inspired by her new hit “7 Rings,” – the only problem was instead of using all the symbols in the video she did some editing that gave the tattoo an entirely new meaning.
Ariana’s recent tattoo translation mishap has been the subject of endless jokes as well as cultural criticism
Image credits: arianagrande
The artist intended for the design to read “7 Rings” using Japanese Kanji symbols, which appear in the song’s music video
Image credits: arianagrande
In the music video’s title card, you see the symbols — “七つの指輪” – which translates to “7 Rings.” However, Grande cut out three of the characters, causing the phrase to change completely. The use of “seven” (七) and “ring” (輪) depicted together on her hand, instead translates to”shichirin” — a small charcoal grill or BBQ.
Although the mistranslation was bizarrely funny, many people voiced their frustrations with people getting tattoos in a language they don’t understand just to be ‘trendy’
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In an attempt to fix her mistake and Grande posted this conversation with her Japanese tutor
Image credits: arianagrande
But still failed…
Image credits: arianagrande
Instead of adding the (指) symbol (or finger) above the tattoo, as her tutor had suggested, she added it directly under the (七) character. Well following the rules of reading Japanese, her “BBQ Grill” correction turned into (七輪指♡) – “Japanese BBQ finger.”
As you can imagine people in the comments showed no mercy over her “correction”
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