20 Shocking Tattoo Spelling Blunders Clients Failed to Spot for Months
I was tattooed by a friend who was doing his apprenticeship at the time.
I got the Albert Camus quote “in the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”
He puts the stencil on, looks great, traces the words, fantastic and crisp lines. Fills in the last r for the quote and this is when I read it out loud to myself and start laughing my head off.
He had tattooed the word “found” twice. I guess when he was tying to sort out the layout he put it at the end of the top row and the beginning of the second and forgot to remove one.
He offered to cover it up then and there or come back when it was healed to fix it. Told him we might as well get it done now and he was able to cover it with a bird. Can barely tell. He also gave me the whole tattoo for free so that was really fun.
Tl;dr read your tattoo out loud if you’re getting script.
I saw a girl at a Utah jazz game with “housewife” tattooed on the back of her neck in Kanji. I commented that that was a coolly Avent garde bit of work and she got all confused. Turns out she requested “wild girl” and got messed with somewhere along the way. This was like 2001, so it might have been hard to look up at the time, who knows. Anyway, we were both embarrassed and I regretted bringing it up.
“not an artist, but….”
My friend got a tattoo of his last name down his ribs. Instead of “Schafer” it read “Shcafer” The guy says “uuuhhhhh I’m gonna need you to come in next week to fix this up” He made the c and the h look fancier so that the could morph into the other. If you look close enough you can tell but at a glance it looks alright.
Not a tattoo artist, but lived with one once. Another roommate rode a Harley, and wanted the Harley eagle and shield on his arm. So the artist found an ad in Easyriders and freehanded a stencil. It looked pretty nice, so he did the tattoo. The bikers brother came over the next day and said “Hey, doesn’t Harly have an ‘E’ in it”? Good times.
Years ago I worked with a gal who had a huge tattoo on her chest, above it had not one but three misspelled words. Recive the love your entitled too have. I asked her what was her intent with the three misspellings, Three? She asked. Me “Receive, You’re, To”
I asked her if her tattoo artist had double checked with her about the saying, and she said he asked her so many times she got mad and told him to just F’ing tattoo what she had written down. Not the brightest bulb for sure.
I had this happen. I had my friend write out a saying I wanted 4 times at varying sizes. When my artist and I looked at it we decided to go with the one on the opposite side of the paper because it was the biggest. Well we never vetted that one, I mean who would spell a word wrong in the fourth sentence right? Well after it was inked in and I took a picture we noticed and we both had a bit of a nervous laugh. In the end he fixed it by slightly shifting the overlaying image and it’s not even noticable now.
My sister got a tattoo across her chest/collarbone area with an incorrect “your/you’re” in it. She was so happy to have gotten the tattoo and posted on social media. I pointed out the error and asked if her tattoo artist would be able to fix it (I should have mentioned that in private but girl, you’ve got a grammatical error on your collarbone for the rest of your life!). Because of the font choice and spacing, there’s no way to fix it without messing up the aesthetics.
And she confirmed that her artist had shown her in a mirror a drawn-on version of the tattoo (I assume this is normal practice as I don’t have any tattoos). Neither of them caught the issue.
As far as I know I’ve had no mistakes in the 10years I’ve been tattooing with the exception of two out of my control. There was a Chinese name in script, the middle name was Yuun but I was emailed Yuin.
We approved the fonts, double checked everything multiple times and like stated in other comments our shop has a spot on the waiver stating we aren’t responsible for spelling/ representation of symbols or foreign lettering. Thankfully the cursive chosen was easy to alter but he made a huge stink about it trying to get money back and it took multiple emails to get him to just fix it.
My shops apprentice tattooed “mean jean” instead of “mean Gene” on a pissed off biker guy. I have no idea how it was fixed, it was big block lettering on the backs of his biceps. I watched the man approve the spelling three times… THEN flip his table.
I know of a tattoo where the artist accidentally misspelled a world – he wrote a lowercase e instead of a lowercase c. He went over it with skin-colored ink, and only charged her half. You can still see it. I would’ve wanted the tattoo free lol.
My artist forgot a word in my tattoo. I honestly didn’t blame her for it, I looked at the stencil many times and we both missed it. honest mistake. as soon as I realized we started coming up with ways to fix it. thankfully it was a pretty easy fix! then we set a time for me to come back (two days later, she came in on a day off for it) and she fixed it for free. she was SUPER apologetic and embarrassed and honestly so was I, but it all ended up fine. the tat is different than I imagined but I still like it. the fix was totally free but I still tipped her for it, tho I don’t think she expected me too at all. I still go back to her. i’d say any respectable artist would behave the same way.
When I was 18, I was in a relationship with a tattooist and helped out in his shop sometimes. One time, a man came in wanting a word tattooed on him. The tattooist drew it up, the customer was happy with what he saw, and I made the stencil (by hand, the tattooist was too cheap to get any machinery) After placing the stencil, the man confirmed he was happy with the tattoo and placement
None of us had noticed that the tattooist had missed a letter (imagine “puple” instead of “purple” – that wasn’t it but it was like that) until the tattoo was partly completed – using the same example, he’d got as far as tattooing “pup” when it suddenly dawned on the customer that it wasn’t right
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