Ideograms and tattoos

Actually, the danger is not in the tattoo itself, but in the tattooists.
Unfortunately internet is full of "horror stories" about oriental tattoos which were guaranteed to have a certain meaning, and turned out to be totally different... below you will find some examples as explained on several websites dedicated to the misuse of Chinese and Japanese characters in western culture.
The greatest part of western tattooists does not know ideograms (hanzi in Chinese, kanji in Japanese), and does not even have an idea of how complex they are: it's so easy to stumble upon mirrored or reverted tattoos, or even partial ideograms which totally lose their meaning.
Those are the gibberish tattoos, first great half of the wrong tattoos, and there are many examples of them on the web... such as the one below, where there are just nine out of twelve zodiac signs, and they are all mirrored:

The other great half of wrong tattoos is even worst: ideograms are correctly inked, but their meaning is definitely not the expected one.
Two examples above all: the man in the picture below carried his tattoo on his chest for 26 years, convinced it was his name, as he was told by a waiter from his favorite Chinese restaurant. Only during a voyage in Asia he found out he actually wore the name "Coke" for all those years...

Another example is about a boy who, turned 18, decided to get his name tattooed. What should have been his name is actually the word "idiot":

One last important tip: do not trust "alphabets" which are claimed to translate names in Chinese characters!
Chinese ideograms are NOT an alphabet, and thus names can not be written by "transcribing" them letter by letter. What can be done is using ideograms whose sound recall the sound of the letters, or syllables, but then... who knows what the results would be?!! They could be totally unpredictable!

In the end, if you want to get an ideogram tattoo, you'd better make your homework first: a search on the internet could save you from bad surprises... and always go to sources you know you can trust. Nowadays you can ask an AI to check it, they improve every day at translations.

Once you have your model, make sure it gets correctly tattooed, not mirrored or upside-down, and as close to the original as possible: a few variations could totally change the meaning of your tattoo, or turn it into gibberish.
And above all, ask yourself if getting ideograms has enough meaning for you to be worth taking the risk!