They want to know, "How do you say this in Japanese?" or "How do you say that in Chinese?" But they often get advice from less than reliable sources. Many people would like to get a tattoo of a certain English word or phrase written in kanji symbols. One of the most common problems seen with kanji tattoos is straight translation. Often, kanji tattoos are made up of meaningless combinations of characters or single characters that, on their own, are enigmatic at best.
In some cases the tattoo artist has reversed the stencil, resulting in a character written backwards, in others they've left out one or more of the strokes, or added something that has no business being there. There are a lot of people walking around with tattoos that have mistakes which are glaring to anyone who can read kanji. Kanji tattoo mistakes happen, a lot more often than many of their wearers realize.