4 words: Picnic table, Shopping trolley.

And you've got sunburn or my computer screen is being odd.

Nah, it's just a dodgy photo taken with a phone in bad lighting. I have a tan these days, amazingly.

How you, anyway?

Apparently written Chinese is standard, the dialect differences etc (eg between Mandarin and Cantonese) arise only with the spoken language. So it may be that your takeaway girl simply made a mistake, or perhaps she was taught incorrectly.

Another thing which occurs: I presume that Chinese has its own word for "tattoo", ie it shouldn't be a loan word: but in that case wouldn't it have its own single ideogram? Because your tattoo has two ideograms, it's plausible that each one could be representing one syllable of the English word; in which case, there might be a number of possible ways to transliterate. In Hebrew transliteration, for example, I can't say that someone who transliterates the Sabbath as "Shabat" has "spelled" it incorrectly, even though most people transliterate it as "Shabbat". Any spelling which causes you to say the word approximately as you would if reading the Hebrew is correct.

I presume that Chinese has its own word for "tattoo", ie it shouldn't be a loan word: but in that case wouldn't it have its own single ideogram?

Not necessarily, no, because the Chinese could have a phrase for "tattoo" rather than a single word.

Yeah, I suppose on reflection they can't have an ideogram for every single word. Their typewriters would be even more unusable...

Apparently the most common way of working with Chinese on the computer is as follows: you type into the computer (using the English keyboard) the transliteration of the word that you want, and the computer presents a number of words (in Chinese or Japanese) that you can pick as being the one you wanted.

I know there was a system that involved having the keys on the keyboard correspond to particular points on the ideogram. Apparently, Chinese typists could get as fast as English ones using that. I imagine greater processing speeds has made the system you describe more effective, but the other system or something like it would still be required for typists who don't know the Roman alphabet.

I wonder if there are people walking around Shanghai with "exotic" tattoos of English words daubed on their flesh?

Why not? The Roman alphabet is pretty damn cool, if you ask me.

I have a backpack which I bought in France, with the following paragraph written in English on it:
"In case you aren't notice, there is more than one way to break a sweat out there. You'd better notice. They are getting into something called Pervario Sports". Who "they" are remains a mystery to me. All I know is, I've never worn that backpack in the UK.

Actually, the waitress may just have been from Taiwan/Hong Kong (anywhere not in the mainland) as 'wen shen' (tattoo) 文身 is perfectly correct in simplified chinese) :)

Well, that's good to hear. Thank you.

I did get a rude email about this a couple of years ago, basically accusing me of being an annoying idiotic white guy with a spelling mistake on his arm. Then another Chinese person — at the same restaurant — confirmed that it does indeed say "tattoo". But I didn't blog any of it 'cause I was too busy having a baby.