I think my friend got a bunk chinese tattoo, please help.

[jjbailey]

My friend got this tattoo years ago, he thinks it says "unforgiven" after his favorite metallica song. i know, how cliche. my point is that i have been learning chinese, not fluent yet, but i tend to at least recognize characters and radicals when i see them. The only character I can make out on his tattoo is "bu" 不, but the rest i have no idea. i have never even seen anything that looks like the second symbol on his tattoo. my point is that i don't believe that it sasys unforgiven as i know the symbols for unforgiven and those are not them. either that or they are the sloppiest versions of them i have ever seen. anyways, please translate this for me if they are intelligable, I would absolutely love to know what it actually says.

[anonymoose]

The last character is 解. Not sure what the second is supposed to be. 諒? It doesn't even look like Chinese.

[roddy]

I think you're right, it's a 諒, with the two top dots omitted and the horizontals merged. Like someone's copied it from calligraphy or something without knowing what they're doing. Bit of a mess. 

[jjbailey]

thank you anonymoose. I thought that second one was liang too. i am surprised you could make out the last one... that would be really ironic if you are correct because then technically the tattoo would say "not understanding" lol. but ive never even seen a chinese symbol with a straight line over the top with no other strokes connecting to it. i was thinking maybe the symbol for one was supposed to be part of the tattoo and the artist was just confused and put it as the top part of the second symbol. idk... ive been trying to figure it out for like an hour now... anyways that helps, thanks

[Tiana]

I can't make out the complete word either, but what I can say for sure is the style of writing is pretty bad. It doesn't matter  anyhow, as I guess your friend is not all the time surrounded by connoisseurs in Chinese calligraphy.

[jjbailey]

haha, no i guess not. i was going to tell him tonight thats not what it said, but since i couldnt make out that second symbol at all, and i wasnt sure the third one was "jie", i wanted to at least find out what it actually meant before i burst his bubble. i would say he is lucky in a way that it doesnt mean something totally off the wall, but the fact is you should not get chinese tattoos unless you know chinese.

[Lu]

It means 'not understanding' in the sense of 'not forgiving', so the meaning is actually pretty close. But the calligraphy is absolutely awful.

[roddy]

But it's meant to mean 'unforgiven' - as in, I guess, I have not been forgiven (for making hasty tattoo decisions, perhaps). What we've got is closer to 'don't forgive', which is different. And not all that close, to be honest. 

 

The calligraphy is about at the edge of how bad you can get and still be halfway understandable. 

[anonymoose]

but ive never even seen a chinese symbol with a straight line over the top with no other strokes connecting to it.

 

丽

三

画