Ariana Grande Tries And Fails To Fix Botched Japanese Tattoo

The best laid tattoo plans of pop stars often go awry.
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Ariana Grande should probably just bid “thank u, next” to tattoos altogether.

The pop star has made a habit of commemorating her musical eras in ink ― she reportedly has upwards of 20 in total ― so after dropping her new single “7 Rings” she did just that by getting the name of the song tattooed in Japanese on her palm Tuesday.

Except the best-laid tattoo plans of pop stars often go awry and Grande accidentally tattooed the word for “shichirin” or “七輪,” which translates to a small Japanese charcoal grill, after nixing two important characters from the phrase.

For what it’s worth, she used the correct translation for seven rings (“七つの指輪”) in the music video for the song, which aptly features the lyric “Girls with tattoos who like getting in trouble.”

While her original tattoo translates to “7 rounds” or “7 wheels” in Chinese, the mishap was, of course, memed into internet gold with many poking fun at the error. Many also raised relevant questions about why Grande is getting body art in a language she is not familiar with.

Grande was quick to make light of the situation, remarking that she’s a “huge fan of tiny bbq grills” and that she stopped short of inking the full phrase due to pain in a series of now-deleted tweets.

Less than 24 hours later, Grande went back under the tattoo pen to seemingly correct the error by adding the kanji character for finger after consulting with her Japanese tutor amid the backlash.

“Slightly better,” she wrote. “Thanks to my tutor for helping me fix and to @kanenavasard for being a legend,” she wrote alongside a photo of her new ink on Instagram Wednesday. “And to my doctor for the lidocaine shots (no joke). RIP tiny charcoal grill. Miss u man. I actually really liked u.”

She also shared the text conversation with the tutor who specifically advised her to add the character above the initial tattoo in order to make sense in Japanese, as characters are typically read top to bottom, right to left.

But Grande included the new character below the original tattoo with a drawing of a heart, instead, which resulted in the ink making even less sense than the original.

Neither of these configurations are coherent in Japanese, as BuzzFeed notes, so most people would likely read the phrase left to right as 七輪指♡, which roughly translates to “small charcoal grill finger ♡.”

While the tattoo is likely to fade away due to its location, it should serve as a temporary reminder that this experience taught Grande everything (love, pain, patience, etc.) except Japanese.

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