My son has decided to get a tattoo. Okay, he's 20, and living on his own so I really don't have a choice, sigh. He has requested that I design the tattoo in the Kanji style. I need to have the word "Imagine" (like the song from John Lennon), and or the word "alto" in Photoshop format (minus the quotes of course). Once I can get that done, I can design the rest of it myself. Anyone that can help me out would be much appreciated. I've come up with this, but it doesn't look right to me at all.

I'm not a big Asian languages expert, but I'm guessing that the words you mention can be rendered in 1 character each. Japanese uses ideograms, so each character also represents a complete idea. I'm sure someone wil come along with the answer. If not, my bosses girlfriend is Japanese and might be able to help. That'll be in about, oh, 11 hours.

Tell him just to get his testicles pierced, it'll probably hurt less than having all that tatooed into his skin. Ah the absolute stupidity of youth.... If he's so keen on it....tell him to come up with his own damn kanji design....and remind him that he runs the risk of having his body proclaim that he is "dog cheap in this size only" Scarab <-grew a beard as my youthful rebellion....took some time but it didnt hurt and I don't look like a jackass.

If he wants to ink let him get it - it isn't going to hurt that much and it's not a big stigma issue anymore. Unless it's on his forehead he isn't going to lose a job over it and so on. Wish I coudl help with the kanji, but I can't.

"Alto" will probably not be in kanji; it's a "borrowed" word and will be written out phonetically in katakana. Imagine, dropping off the verbing characters, is two kanji. I'm not much of a calligrapher, but give me a minute and I'll do a graphic.

OK, I lied. I'm not a calligrapher at all. I have the handwriting of a Japanese 5-year-old. But, this should give you an idea of what characters you're looking for. Someone more familiar with Japanese may correct me if I drew one of the characters wrong.

Nothing wrong with kanji tattoos ( said the man with an arm load of 'em and a dragon plus a phoenix coming up lol) I might suggest using babelfish to get the kanji and then jazz 'em up a bit. Let your son realise that he will be marked for life so he needs to be sure about it. He should go to the best tattoist he can, check out the artist's work, spend 6 months thinking about it and then think again. Ah the absolute stupidity of youth.... Ah the bitterness of old age... Mon (49)

Oh yeh http://japanese.about.com/bltattoo.htm This should help you out with regard to your image....Who are you calling a three legged hippopotamus?

Depending on where he's going to put it, I'd say give hime some support. You can't tell a 20 year old what to do, but you can sometimes impress upon them the wisdom of one path over another if you approach it calmly. My (then) 17 year old daughter and I got tattooed together. We each have the same tattoo on our left shoulder blade: a stylize version of the voodoo veve (symbol) for the Marassa, the Divine Twins. It's a daddy's girl bonding thing.

Here's 3 different fonts. These are the only ones I have on this Compy, if you want something more brush style, email me and I can send it over later, .psd even if you like. Ryan

I have 12 different Kanji fonts now on my system, but I need specifically the words Imagine and Alto (separate files), and in brush style according to the child. He is going to have it on his shoulder (high). But since I don't know the "picture" series to use for this, they are worthless at this point.

On the positive side, 30 years from now he can tell people they mean something completely different (something that's culturally relavant at the time) and impress them with his wisdom and foresight!

Attached Link: http://babelfish.altavista.com/

Still here at work ... If you have the fonts on your computer you can use them like this if you've got Win 2K or XP and MSWord. I'll still try to get something cool out when I get home, sometime before the Crap of Dawn. So if all this is too much don't worry about it. Go to http://babelfish.altavista.com/ Type in Imagine and translate from English to Japanese. Copy and past into MS Word. Do the same with Alto. (Alto won't look as cool, as Fyre pointed out, it's a loan word, so they use a different 'alphabet') Then you can change the font to whatever you like best. or, if you're familair with the Windows Japanese Input Method (IME) Open MS Word, Switch to Japanese. Type in "souzou" and hit the spacebar. When the characters above are displayed hit enter, otherwise, hit space again. For alto, type in "aruto", space, and enter when it looks like Fyre's writing above. Ryan

My son is a member of the Seattle Cascades...a drum corps group that finished as one of the top twelve world finalists in Drum Corps International this past year. Their corps song was Imagine. Plus I am incorporating a modified logo. I was able to get a kanji translation for imagine...along with the logo (modified). I'm still not happy with what I've done...but it's a start.

Ryan...the problem is that he wants the dang thing in Photoshop format, and bringing it into Word doesn't work as a modifiable image...sigh. I'd love to see other suggestions.

nu-be, no, because PDF would not be a transparent image...lord knows why...I guess the tattoo artists want it that format or something.

FWIW, the bottom 2 characters on BluesPadawan's graphic are "suru" which essentially means "to do." I don't personally know the Kanji characters for "imagine" but this adds a nice active touch. Also, the black and white JPEG that's posted can be taken into Photoshop and converted - although it's small and scaling it up would distort it (amount varies depending on how big you resized it).

BluesPadwan I found the kanji I needed, scaled it up to my arm size in PSP 6, printed it out and then transfered the image to flash paper for the tattoist..lol..then did it again 'cause I did the lettering back to front : By inking the final image you'll give it some personal characteristics, don't forget japanese is just a language and people's writing is always slightly different. The thing about having the image on paper is that you can..lol..put it on your arm to see what it looks like. Oh shut up the lot of you ;) at least I'm being honest. I'm lucky as my nickname is a japanese word with two different kanji that I can pick. If you know any chinese people you could always ask them, the japanese use chinese letters mainly. Mon

Ok, Here's a high quality image I've got for ya, email me and I can send alng a psd version if you need