Carrie Ann Inaba feels Ariana Grande’s pain.
The “Dancing With the Stars” judge, 51, revealed that an ankle tattoo she thought said “courageous love” in Japanese actually translates to something much more NSFW.
On Friday’s episode of “The Talk” — where Inaba is now serving as a permanent replacement for Julie Chen — she explained that she got the ink while touring with Madonna as a dancer in 1993, calling it a “rash” decision. However, years later, she was in Japan and some locals explained that the kanji letters meant something quite different.
“I’m in Japan many years later and these girls were like ‘he hehe’ and I go, ‘I know, courageous love, cool right?’” Inaba said. “And they were like, ‘Rough sex.’”
Inaba isn’t the first to mess up kanji letters. Ariana Grande recently debuted a painful tattoo on the palm of her hand that was meant to say “7 Rings,” a tribute to her song of the same name. However, the internet quickly let her know that she was missing a character, and it actually translated to “shichirin,” which is a small barbecue grill.
While Grande later added an extra character to (somewhat) fix her ink — with some imagination and a top-to-bottom, then left-to-right reading, it does indeed say “7 Rings” now — Inaba has yet to correct her 26-year-old tat.
“I need to fix it,” she said.