Roughly in order of how obvious the damage is, from the ones a stranger will spot
across a room to the one only a native reader will ever notice.
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1
The character is simply not a character
The purest failure, and still the most common. It comes from two sources: machine translation fed a word it cannot place, and the "alphabet chart" that some studios keep on the wall, matching each letter of the Latin alphabet to a Chinese character. Chinese has no alphabet. Characters stand for words and morphemes, not for sounds, so a name spelled out through such a chart produces a row of unrelated words. Tian Tang, who has been collecting these on Hanzi Smatter since 2004, calls the results the gibberish font. The tell is that no Chinese reader can read it, including the ones who tell you politely that they can.
The check: Get the characters from a dictionary entry or a sourced reference page, not from a chart, an app, or an image search.
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2
The character is real, and means something adjacent
This is the listicle injury. A page gives you one character and one English word, you take the word at face value, and the character turns out to sit somewhere else in meaning. English "power" splits in Chinese across physical force, held authority, and situational momentum, and only one of those is the character usually offered. English "respect" splits between an inner attitude and its enacted form. English "prosperity" is a cluster of at least four characters that a native reader distinguishes instantly. Nothing here is wrong on the skin. It is just not what you meant, and you will never find out.
The check: Before committing, read a full entry on the character rather than a gloss. If a source cannot tell you what the character does not mean, it does not know what it means.
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3
Simplified and traditional in the same piece
Mainland China writes simplified forms; Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau write traditional ones. Both are completely correct. Mixing them inside one design is not, and it is the most frequent flaw in Western character work, usually because the characters were sourced one at a time from different places. A literate reader registers it the way you would register a sentence where the font changed halfway through: not unreadable, just visibly assembled by someone who could not read it.
The check: Pick one system for the whole piece and check every character against it, including any that look identical in both.
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4
Mirrored, rotated, or upside down
Characters have a fixed orientation and almost no rotational redundancy, so a flip that would go unnoticed in an abstract design turns a character into a non-character. It happens when a low-resolution reference is traced from the back of a stencil, and it happens with vertical arrangements where the artist has guessed at reading order. Note the one deliberate exception, which trips people the other way: the character for good fortune is hung upside down on doors at Chinese New Year on purpose, because the word for inverted puns on the word for arrived. That is a doorway joke. On skin it just reads as an error.
The check: Compare the applied stencil against the reference in a mirror before the first line goes in. Mirrored stencils are visible at a glance once you look for them.
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5
You asked for Chinese and got Japanese
Japanese writes with Chinese characters and has done for fifteen centuries, so most of the time this changes nothing and the design is correct in both languages. The trap is the minority of characters where Japan's 1949 reform landed somewhere different from China's 1956 one, which produces a shape a Chinese reader clocks as foreign immediately. It is a real failure mode with a narrow footprint, and it has its own page here rather than a paragraph.
Chinese characters vs. Japanese
The check: Ask which script the reference file is in. If the answer is vague, treat the answer as unknown.
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6
A sentence translated one word at a time
Short phrases fail differently from single characters. Chinese grammar carries meaning through word order and through particles that have no English counterpart, so an English sentence mapped word by word onto Chinese words produces something with the shape of a sentence and no grammar in it. The results read to a native speaker roughly the way tourist-menu English reads to you: the topic is recoverable, the sentence is not, and the overall impression is comic rather than profound.
The check: For anything longer than two characters, use an established set phrase with a documented source, or have a fluent reader compose it. A four-character idiom with a classical origin is a safer and better-looking choice than a translated motto.
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7
Drawn rather than written
Chinese characters have a fixed stroke order, and it is not decorative. Order determines which strokes are laid down under tension and which are released, where a stroke tapers, and how components crowd each other, so a character built in the correct order has a rhythm that a traced outline does not. An artist copying a shape without knowing the order produces something with the right silhouette and dead insides. Chinese readers describe this without hesitating and usually without being able to say why.
The check: Bring a reference produced by a real brush face or a calligrapher rather than a system font stretched to fit, and let the artist see the stroke sequence.
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8
Correct, and reads as an office memo
The subtlest one. The character is right, the form is consistent, the design is clean, and the word is simply not one that a Chinese person would ever put on their body. Some characters are correct but bureaucratic, some carry a register that is closer to a slogan than to a private conviction, and a few are unlucky enough that no native speaker would consider them. The character for death is the clearest case: it is a serious and beautiful word to study, and essentially nobody in the Chinese-speaking world tattoos it, so the effect on a reader is not depth but alarm.
The check: Ask a native reader what the character makes them feel, not what it means. Those are different questions and only the second one has a dictionary answer.