We know as well as anyone that tattoos are an instant shortcut to becoming cool, but it's really embarrassing when someone points out that the Chinese character on your shoulder that you were told said "honor" actually says "herpes." Well, it turns out that the makeup people on movie sets make mistakes like this all the time, such as ...

5 The Tattoos in The Mummy Give Away Plot Points the Wearers Don't Know About

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The events of The Mummy are set in motion when the High Priest Imhotep bangs the pharaoh's mistress and murders the pharaoh. The pharaoh's male stripper bodyguards, the Medjai, covered in a lot of douchebaggy facial tattoos, catch Imhotep and punish him by mummifying him alive.

They then make their jobs unreasonably difficult for themselves by granting Imhotep the power to come back to life and then guarding his corpse for 3,000 years to ensure he never does so.

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"It's called job security."

What the Tattoos Really Say:

With a movie like The Mummy, you might assume that the tattoos are random markings the costume or makeup people applied to look cool. But as you're about to find out in this article, there is almost always a real attempt to make foreign-language tattoos say something meaningful. It's just almost never correct.

So when translated, the meaning of the Medjai's tattoos initially seems reasonable -- they have references to Imhotep's name and some kind of secret city in the desert.

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Made all the more secret by having it tattooed on his face, of course.

Specifically, the approximate English sounds for these five characters are I, M, H, T and P -- Imhotep.

And as for their rippling pecs: