Sonya

When I first saw this tattoo, I thought it wasn't Hebrew writing at all. It looks like some weird script, Martian maybe?


The victim claims this Hebrew-like doodle to be her name, and on closer inspection I realized that it really was. It just so happened that when trying to render her tattoo vertically, some letters were rotated and some were not, creating this very strange result.

I never had to draw this particular chart before:


In any case, the Hebrew tattoo most likely says "Ebony Eve". Most likely, since aside from being mis-rotated, it's also slightly misspelled. So if you have another interpretation of this name, I'd love to hear it!


And this is how you would correctly write "Ebony Eve" in Hebrew. Ebony on the right, Eve is on the left.


My suggestion, when it comes to words which have letters of different height, is not to rotate it letter by letter. It just doesn't look nice.

Want your Hebrew tattoo to be vertical? Just turn the whole thing 90 degrees counter-clockwise. Like this:

First, an announcement. You can now comfortably browse Bad Hebrew Tattoos on your iPhone, using our brand new iPhone App, available for free!

Back to buisness, today we have a name tattoo, something we haven't seen in a while. This victim wanted the name Collin, tattooed in Hebrew on his arm. He ended up with this:


To tell you the truth, had this tattoo not been labeled on the site I plucked it from, I would have never been able to interpret it correctly! It reads like a misspelled Ka'alelinen, not at all what the poet intended.

There are several glaring mistakes in this bad Hebrew tattoo. First, the doubling of the letter Lamed - in Hebrew you don't do that, even if Collin does have double L. If it sounds like one L, you write just one Lamed, otherwise a vowel between the two Ls is assumed. Same goes for all double-letter names, such as Anna, Todd or Bobby.

Then, there is the last letter, Nun. The victim unwittingly wrote both final and not-final forms of the letter, instead of using just one. This is a very common (and ugly) mistake, for which alphabet guides and their unaware users are to be blamed.

And finally, the O in Collin is much better represented by a Vav and not the Ayin our victim chose.


Correcting all that, we get a correctly spelled Collin in Hebrew. Note that this spelling can be used for all similarly pronounced names, like Colin or Coline.