Ariana Grande shouts out to girls with tattoos in the first verse of her new hit single, 7 Rings , and she revealed some fresh ink of her own to celebrate the song. But Grande’s fans and critics alerted her that the characters didn’t mean “seven rings” in Japanese as she probably intended. In Japanese kanji, the characters translate to shichirin – a small charcoal grill. Ironically, the correct Japanese translation of “seven rings” can be seen at the 12-second mark in the music video. Ariana Grande gets ‘grilled’ over Japanese tattoo typo Grande later tried to correct her tattoo, but wound up complicating things further. BuzzFeed reported that Grande posted a text exchange with her Japanese tutor on Instagram in which the tutor explained which kanji characters and placement would fix the error. The post now appears to be deleted. In an Instagram story posted on Thursday, Grande showed off a revised tattoo. “Slightly better,” she wrote. “Thanks to my tutor for helping me fix.” Except, it wasn’t better. A BuzzFeed Japan reporter was quick to point out that the new, incorrect placement of the additional kanji characters actually made it read “Japanese barbecue finger”. And Kotaku reported that because characters are sometimes read top to bottom and right to left, adding the new kanji character beneath the existing ones made the tattoo translate into nonsense. BuzzFeed explains that if read left to right instead, it would translate into “charcoal barbecue grill finger (heart)”. Grande’s Instagram caption concluded: “R.I.P. tiny charcoal grill. Miss u man. I actually really liked it.”
