A tattoo is a mark made by inserting pigment into the skin; in technical terms, tattooing is dermal pigmentation. Tattoos may be made on human or animal skin. Tattoos on humans are a type of body modification, while tattoos on animals are most commonly used for identification or branding.

Tattooing has been practiced worldwide. The Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan, wore facial tattoos. Tattooing was widespread among Polynesian peoples, and among certain tribal groups in the Philippines, Borneo, Africa, North America, South America, Mesoamerica, Europe, Japan, Cambodia and China. Despite some taboos surrounding tattooing, the art continues to be popular all over the world.

Tattooing has been around for thousands of years and has a direct link to culture and symbolism of each culture. Tattooing has been a Eurasian practice at least since Neolithic times. Mummies bearing tattoos and dating from the end of the second millennium BC have been discovered at Pazyryk on the Ukok Plateau. Tattooing in Japan is thought to go back to the Paleolithic era, some ten thousand years ago. Various other cultures have had their own tattoo traditions, ranging from rubbing cuts and other wounds with ashes, to hand-pricking the skin to insert dyes.

Chinese character tattoos or kanji tattoos are tattoos consisting of Chinese characters (hanzi or kanji). Even though they are based on the Chinese or Japanese writing systems, these tattoos are almost unheard of in China and Japan, and are instead a relatively recent phenomenon originating in Western countries which do not use these writing systems.

Many such tattoos are unreadable or nonsense in the original language, and the forms of the Chinese characters are also often mistaken. Furthermore, as most tattoo artists are unfamiliar with Asian writing systems, the characters are often copied directly from a printed source (as if someone had a tattoo in the Times New Roman font), or else are improvised by the artists and often result in illegible or childlike penmanship. The blog Hanzi Smatter gives many examples of the mistaken use of Chinese characters in tattoos. It is for this very reason that any individual wishing to get a tattoo featuring Chinese characters should carefully research their intended design.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org & http://www.anilgupta.com