A TYPICAL SCENARIO: Mr. Who, an Asian American, and a friend are getting a quiet drink and catching up on small talk in a relatively cozy bar in, say, New Hope, Pennsylvania. They're suddenly interrupted by a pair of young men, most likely white, usually in their very early 20s, almost certainly wearing carefully creased baseball caps. One of them has a tank top showing off a bestiary of tattooed dragons, lion-dogs, and cranes. They both hold wheat-colored beers in plastic cups, and the one without any visible tattoos is snickering at his friend. Tattoo approaches with a sheepish smile and pops the question: "Hey, I got this tattoo last month, and it's supposed to be the Chinese word for 'strength,' but my friend here says it probably says 'No. 8 lunch special.' Can you tell me what it really says?"

It's a hypothetical situation, but one that's becoming more and more familiar. In fact, there's a Website, hanzismatter.com, that's devoted to documenting atrocious, permanent bio-grammatical errors.

Well, maybe not so permanent, according to James Morel, CEO of the tattoo-removal center Dr. TATTOFF in Beverly Hills, California. "As far as Asian symbols go, we get seven or eight or nine a week, and of those, five or six are mistranslated," he said. "It's fairly regular. The Asian tattoos were a trend in the '90s, and anything in the '90s is a fad to remove now."

For Asian Americans, the question is how to handle the inquiring victim of a potentially bad Asian-language tattoo. New York jewelry designer Jane Ko takes the diplomatic route.

"For the most part I can just get away by saying, 'I don't know,' but usually I'm nice," she said. "If they have it tattooed on them already, even if it's not quite bad, I wouldn't translate it. Like somebody once had the character for 'spirit' tattooed on them, but it wasn't the character I'd use for 'spirit.' The character he was using was more like 'gas.' But at that point, I was like, he already has it on him." Other tattoos she's seen, either on people or on tattoo-parlor walls, include weird literalisms like "to sway and to roll" for "rock 'n' roll" and "blood and intestines" for "blood and guts," tattoos that are reversed as if drawn in a mirror, and tattoos that use such bad calligraphy that it appears as if a young child had drawn them.

"If they have it tattooed on them," says Ko, "I just go with their story, because I feel it's so horrible to tell somebody that they have a tattoo that doesn't mean what they think it means."

New York graphic designer Christine Yeh, who avoids translating tattoos, says explaining why a person's Asian-language tattoo often requires a lengthy and detailed explanation.

"I can never tell them that when you put those two words together, i.e. 'powerful love,' it just never makes any sense in Chinese. We just don't talk like that," she said. "It has to be a complete sentence, if we want to say 'powerful love,' and it would be at least five characters."

Maria Robinson, a videogame designer of Chinese descent who lives in Oakland, California, also noted that the same characters can mean completely different things in Mandarin than they do in Cantonese, or vice versa.

Others can be less forgiving than Ko or Yeh. Alice Lee Stevenson, of Long Beach, California, says it all depends on the attitude of the person asking.

"I hate it when people ask me to translate their stupid Asian-language tattoos or the words on their screened hipster T-shirts, but if I know the symbol (very rarely the case), I will tell them what it stands for, and if the person is nice (again, very rarely the case), I'll say, 'Yeah, it probably means what the tattoo guy told you,'" she said.

"But if I'm particularly annoyed with the person (more often the case), I'll tell the person it translates loosely to mean 'none of your beeswax, you jive turkey,' or sometimes I'll pretend I'm Korean and tell them it's not a Korean character, but maybe they should find some other Asian-looking person to ask—but not those two people over there, because they're Korean too, can't you tell—or do we all look alike to you?"

And that, of course, is the core of the problem with Asian-language tattoos, many say. While it can be flattering that the recent fascination with Asian cultures has developed a newfound respect for all things Asian among non-Asian Americans, it also hasn't translated, if you will, into a better-informed American public or helped overturn old stereotypes.

"I don't mind non-Asian people being into Asian styles or cultures, but it would be nice if they didn't assume all Asians knew about all things Asian, including knowing how to translate any character that looks Asian to them," Stevenson said.

Of course, there's another lesson to be learned from the Asian-language-tattoo fad—learning not to stereotype about the kind of person who'd get a bad Asian-language tattoo.