The American popstar says there’s a story behind her embarrassing tattoo mistake.

Earlier this month, Ariana Grande’s love of tattoos made news when it was revealed she’d gotten Pokemon’s Eevee inked onto her bicep. Today, fans around the world are talking about the relationship between Grande’s tattoos and Asian characters again, but this time it’s in a whole different context.

The characters we’re talking about today are two kanji ones that the American singer-songwriter recently got inked into her upper palm. The new markings are a meaningful homage to her new single “7 Rings”, which is currently at the top of music charts in a number of different countries.

▼ “7 Rings” is all about the rings she bought her seven friends on the day she returned her engagement ring to former fiancee Pete Davidson.

The title of the new single is correctly translated into Japanese as “七つの指輪” (“nanatsu no yubiwa“) in the official music video.

The appearance of Japanese in the clip is Grande’s hat-tip to Japan, a country that’s been close to her heart since she sang with Japanese YouTuber Hikakin back in 2014. With so much meaning behind the title of her new single, it’s easy to see why the singer was inspired to ink her body with the words “7 Rings” in Japanese. However, this is what she wound up with.

Instead of writing out the whole thing, she chose to use only the first kanji (七), which translates to “seven”, and the last one (輪) which is read as “wheel”, “hoop,” “ring”, or “circle”. However, when the two kanji are combined, they don’t read “7 Rings”. They read “shichirin”, which is a small charcoal grill.

▼ In Japan, shichirin are used to barbecue things like fish.

The singer was inundated with comments drawing attention to her embarrassing tattoo fail, prompting the 25-year-old to delete the original photo of it from her Instagram account. However, when the image popped up on Twitter with more comments about her “charcoal grill” tattoo, Grande replied with a tweet that read:

“indeed, i left out “つの指” which should have gone in between. it hurt like f*** n still looks tight i wouldn’t have lasted one more symbol lmao. but this spot also peels a ton and won’t last so if i miss it enough, i’ll suffer thru the whole thing next time.”

The tweet was deleted hours later, but fans and news outlets aren’t letting her forget about the mistake, bringing her even more pain than the tattoo itself.

Still, given Grande’s knowledge of the Japanese language, which she’s studied herself, you’d think she would’ve been able to avoid the blunder. It could’ve been worse, though – she could’ve ended up with “chicken noodle soup” inked on her for eternity.

Source: Twitter/@hey__amo
Featured image: YouTube/Arianna Grande
Insert images: YouTube/Arianna Grande, Wikipedia/DryPot

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