To play devil's advocate, such a thing as transcribing Western names phonetically using Chinese characters does exist, both in contemporary Chinese and in other

To play devil's advocate, such a thing as transcribing Western names phonetically using Chinese characters does exist, both in contemporary Chinese and in other historical or minority Chinese-derived languages, as well as in old Japanese. Here are the current rules for standard Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_into_Chinese_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_into_Chinese_cha... And here is some information about the same thing historically done in Japanese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ateji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ateji That being said, I have only glanced at that tattoo table and it seems wildly inaccurate and simplified. But the underlying concept does exist.