The infamous tattoo (Picture: Blekinge Lans Tidning)

A spelling mistake during a tattoo is always embarrassing, especially when it’s a relative that you’re commemorating.

So spare a thought for Swedish mother Johanna Giselhäll Sandström, 30, whose tattoo artist allegedly misspelled her son Kevin’s name as Kelvin.

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But instead of looking into painful and lengthy tattoo removal processes, Ms Sandstrom had a cunning solution: legally change the name of her son.

Her original plan was to get an emotive tribute to her new born child, but was left reeling when she saw the mistake.


‘I thought I was going to faint,’ she told local newspaper Blekinge Läns Tidning, ‘I said I wanted the names of my children tattooed on me and I gave the artist their names. The artist drew the design and didn’t ask anything about the spelling so I didn’t give it any more thought.’

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It wasn’t till later that she noticed the huge mistake, but on returning to the tattoo parlour the artist laughed and could only offer a refund.



After looking into the removal process, Ms Sandstrom claimed and her husband came to the decision that the more intelligent thing to do would be to rename their two year old child.

Now that they’ve had a third child, Freya, Ms Sandstrom is looking to get yet more commemorative tattoos. But this time she vows not to make the same mistake. She said:

‘I’m going to write it down on a piece of paper and check it over 10,000 times.’