And Finally Artist News

Ariana Grande grilled over new tattoo

By | Published on Thursday 31 January 2019

Ariana's Grill

Ariana Grande has started a new celebrity trend! She’s followed Ed Sheeran’s lead by getting a grill-themed tattoo. Although, unlike Ed, not intentionally.

Sheeran had “Galway grill” tattooed on his arm during the video shoot for his song ‘Galway Girl’. Although he pretended otherwise initially, it turned out that it was planned hilarity. Ariana Grande, however, has fallen foul of a low pain threshold and things meaning different things in different languages.

Earlier this week, Grande posted a picture on various social media of a new tattoo on the palm of her hand. Featuring Chinese characters ‘七輪’, meaning “seven rings”, she got the new ink in celebration of her new single of the same name going to number one in the US.

However, many seeing the image on her official Japanese Twitter account quickly pointed out that they saw the phrase “small charcoal grill” – the same characters having a different meaning in Japan.

Acknowledging this on Twitter, Grande admitted that she’d initially intended for the tattoo to be in Japanese. However, due to the pain of having a needle jabbed into her hand, she’d shortened it to Chinese, which uses fewer characters (although what she ended up with in Chinese actually translates to something more like “seven wheels”).

“I left out ‘つの指’, which should have gone in between”, she wrote. Doing so would have made it work in Japanese. But, she adds, “it hurt like fuck and … I wouldn’t have lasted one more symbol”.

There’s nothing like public mockery to focus the mind though. She subsequently posted a photo of an update to the tattoo on her Instagram story. Underneath the original inking, she’s now had added ‘指’ – meaning ‘finger’ – and a heart. “Slightly better”, she noted. Although only very slightly.

Adding the new character to the end would indeed change it to mean ‘seven hoops’ in Japanese, which is closer to the song title. Although breaking it onto a new line is grammatically incorrect. So anyone reading it will still see ‘small charcoal grill, finger, heart’.

She could perhaps attempt to pass it off as a safety warning, I guess. Although the heart makes it look like she enjoys burning her fingers. But I suppose she has had her fingers burnt in a metaphorical sense.



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