Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Hebrew on the Q Train (Tattoosday Plays the Alphabet Game)

After the N train, next up was the Q train (no O or P in the MTAlphabet).

3:55 P.M. Off of the N train at Canal Street.

3:57 P.M. On a northbound Q train at Canal Street.

4:15 P.M. Doubts creeping in, just about decided that this may be it. Do the Q train and then take the R train all the way home and hope for a tattoo. I would fall short of the last three lettered trains (S, w and Z).

4:18 P.M. Got off the Q at 72nd Street. Will head back on a southbound Q. This is one of the new stations on the Second Avenue subway line and they have charging docks for cell phones. My battery is at 23%.

4:35 P.M. After a brief recharge I am back on a Q headed south toward Brooklyn. I meet Joram, who piqued my interest with this tattoo in Hebrew on his forearm:


Despite my basic rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew, I couldn't quite place what this tattoo says, so I asked.

Joram told me that it means "Jesus is my Saviour," but that he left some elements off.

Had this been any other day, I may have deferred on this tattoo, but it is part of the alphabet game experiment.

It is also a perfect example of why I don't often feature tattoos in other languages. I don't know what this actually says, if anything, in Hebrew, but the name of Jesus, as far as I can tell, doesn't even appear correctly in the tattoo. In fact, this is Jesus' name in Hebrew:
In the tattoo, the closest thing to that is the word on the far left. However, it is missing a letter and, to make matters worse, is written backwards, from left to right, when, in fact Hebrew is read from right to left..

Nonetheless, the tattoo holds the meaning for Joram, and, ultimately, that is what is most important.

Thanks to Joram for sharing his work tattoo with us on Tattoosday.

The full Alphabet game can be revisited in the original post here.

Check out the next post to see if I threw in the towel after the R train, or if I persevered and finished the alphabet!

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1 comment:

  1. This tattoo makes it obvious that the person wearing it does not speak or read Hebrew. It is written backwards. As it is written, it literally translates as Yilsh Hishmar Oh and Shai. Or, you know - gibberish. If you completely flip it around and write it properly in Hebrew, it would look like this: ישו הוא רמשיח שלי and mean "Jesus is my Messiah"

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