Ink

Lesson learned: when getting a tattoo in a foreign language, MAKE SURE it appears correctly when printed.


Okay, so some of you know that I have a tattoo. Those who don't - surprise! It's on my left shoulder and it looks like this:

I got it in college on a trip to Tennessee with some friends. It wasn't a spur-of-the-moment decision by any means; I had been thinking about it for quite awhile. Oh, by the way, the word is in Arabic and is supposed to say "beloved". After searching for the perfect translation on the internet (apparently online arabic translators had a lot of room for improvement 5 years ago) I copied and pasted into a Word document so I could print it out. 


Discovery: Word does not support Arabic text!!! 


Since I never had a human translation, I was always somewhat curious as to whether or not it actually said what I thought it did. So this weekend, while procrastinating grading papers, I did some research I discovered that, lo and behold, Word is unsupportive of Arabic text, and had flipped my cool arabic word around so that it is actually backwards of what it should be. 
Awesome. 
Commence mild panic. 
Deep breath.
Resume research.
After continued research, I actually found out some good news! Because this arabic word has repeated letters, only the letter that looks like a giant "E" at the left end is incorrect. So what my tattoo should say is closer to this: عزيز. Not too difficult to fix.


So on my to-do list now is get this tattoo fixed so I will no longer look like an ignorant idiot walking around with a foreign word on her back just to look cool. 


I mean, how would you feel if you saw someone walking around with a word on her shoulder that said "devoleb". Dumb, right? You would probably laugh at them. To yourself, of course.