So you want to get a tattoo — in Scottish Gaelic. You want to honour a family member, or your Scottish heritage, or you just think the Gaelic language is cool, but you don’t speak Gaelic yourself. What should you do?

If you’ve already designed your tattoo, and you know exactly what you want it to say, your first impulse will probably be to turn to the internet for a translation. Here in Part One I’ll show you why that’s not a good idea, and in Part Two, I’ll give you some advice if you still really have your heart set on a Gaelic tattoo.

Now, how do you think you’re going to get a translation on the internet? Online translating services don’t do Scottish Gaelic (yet). This is what happens when you’re dealing with a “lesser-used” language. There just aren’t that many of us Gaelic speakers around, and so large companies tend not to cater to us with goods and services. But even when online translating services do offer Scottish Gaelic, beware. Google Translate made a hash of Irish, and online translators generally don’t work that well.

So maybe you find an online dictionary and try to do the translation yourself. You will still end up with a Bad Gaelic Tattoo. For example:

Although this particular tattoo was intended to be in Irish, I’ll discuss it here because bad Scottish Gaelic tattoos have the exact same problems.

The bearer of the tattoo believes that it says “DRUG FREE.” The idea of a person declaring her/himself “drug free” is a specific American English cultural concept. It’s a declaration that the person in question does not take alcohol, nicotine, or recreational drugs that are illegal in the U.S. This orientation to drugs is a cultural phenomenon or movement known as “Straight Edge.”

Apart from the problem that the cultural concept does not translate, this tattoo has fatal spelling and grammar problems. In Scottish Gaelic, “drug” is druga or droga and the plural, “drugs,” is drugaichean. In Irish it’s singular druga and plural drugaí. Gaelic words don’t have apostrophes in the middle, and “-ail” is not a plural suffix. So “drug’ail” is not a Gaelic word.

When confronted with this information by blog commenters, the tattoo bearer insisted that her trusted friends who were raised Irish-speaking in Ireland had given her this translation. She said: “Fine; whatever. The people that I know say that I’m right; the Irish Gaelic-English dictionary says that I’m right. But, go ahead guys. Tell me that my tattoo is wrong. It doesn’t matter. I’m happy with it.” She stated that she had also looked up “drug” in an English-Irish dictionary and found the word drugáil, and that the apostrophe was supposed to represent the fada (or srac in Scottish Gaelic) over the á.

Another commenter pointed out that in the dictionary where the tattoo bearer looked it up, drugáil was defined as a transitive verb, in the sense of “to drug (someone).” More precisely, it is a verbal noun which means “drugging.” Additionally, apostrophes are not used as substitutes for accent marks in Irish or Gaelic (or in French or Spanish for that matter).

Beyond that, the adjective saor does mean free, but it’s not used in the same way as “free” in English. If you wanted the sense of “free” that’s in the English expression “drug-free,” the sense of being not under the control of drugs, or of drugs being absent from one’s life or body, then it might make sense to use the expression gun (“without”). Except that gun also changes the first sound of the following word, if it’s a consonant, so that would make it literally “gun dhrugaichean,” without drugs, except that in this case the n blocks lenition of homorganic t and d, so it’s “gun drugaichean,”… but even that does not have the Straight Edge connotation of the English phrase “drug free.”

So the way this tattoo reads to a Gaelic speaker is either “FREE DRUGGING” or “FREE DRUGS” with a side helping of “I CAN’T DO IRISH SPELLING OR GRAMMAR.”

After multiple Irish speakers left comments pointing out that her tattoo was incorrect, the tattoo bearer finally stated: “It’s already on my back, right or wrong, and the sentiment is still there. I did research for two years before I got the tattoo, and no one ever told me it was wrong until after I got it. So, fine. It still means the same thing to me that it always did.”

The end result is that an English-speaking woman paid a large sum of money to have broken bits of Irish inscribed across her back for others to see, but it only means something in her own mind. To the fluent Irish speakers of the world, it’s garbled nonsense.