Katakana is good?

Hi everyone, I've just coming back from my holiday in Japan. I love it!! I love everything of Japan: people, food, culture....

I've one question for you: I'd like to do a tattoo of my children names; I'm italian so I think the best choice is to use katakana (maybe the only choice).

The names are:
SARA
SAMI (nickname of Samantha)
SIMI (nickname of Simone)

In katakana I've found these symbols:

サラ
サミ
シミ

are they correct or there are mistakes?
Is it ok if I'm going to write symbols orizontally and without spaces (サラサミシミ) or they will assume other meaningful (or ridicolus meaninful)?

if you should have any other suggestions, they will be appreciated

Thank you everybody
Claudio

If you're Italian I'd think the best choice would be Italian. But anyway the katakana is correct although the last one is actually pronounced SHIMI but that's because that's how they pronounce the "C" sound.

Yes, I knew that the "C" sound does not exist and becomes "SHI" in katakana, but for me it is a good approximation. The important thing is that the union of the symbols does not generate something else

Thank you so much

Japanese can be written top-down as well as left-right. So if they are oriented this way it's possible a Japanese person might first read them as RAMIMI and SASASHI. But these have no particular meeting. If you treat it like a word search puzzle I can see SARAMI (Salami) and SASAMI (a type of yakitori) and MIMI (ear).

Roxcla,

The world SARA in Japanese means plate or dish, so I think that would be a bad choice for a tattoo

I wouldn't get too nervous about any adjacent meanings in Japan. Not with Sara, anyway. According to the site below, Sara is actually ranked #1348 (out of 5962 possible names) in Japan in a 2023 survey.


If you're going to get worked up about a name, the one to get worked up about would be シミ, which means "stain" in Japanese.

But, we're talking about non-Japanese names on a non-Japanese guy, so everyone will grant him some grace concerning these names. And as long as they are in katakana (and not kanji) I think everyone will know they are names.

サラサミシミ would invite some confusion. Personally, I would arrange the names in vertical order (as you had in your original post) like this;

サラ
サミ
シミ

But depending on the font and the spacing and the skill level of the tattooist, it could indeed end up looking "boxy" and confusing as to whether it should be read horizontally as three words, or vertically as two words. So hopefully your tattooist is Japanese, or has some sensitivity about these things.

Alternatively, if you want to have them horizontal you could put the Japanese equivalent of a comma between them.

サラ、サミ、シミ

Again, make sure your tatooist actually knows Japanese somehow so it turns out right.

Thank you for all your explanations. I'll think about it
Claudio

Also better to use a nice font rather than what you see here in the web browser online.

This is like using a font like Arial. Perfectly legible but not artistic at all.


vs. something with a traditional brush stroke vibe


Here's an example of somebody who didn't know anything about the language so they made a fundamental mistake.