A perfect example of why you shouldn’t get a tattoo in a language you do not know. It is meant to be Psalm 23:4, which in English is – “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” Unfortunately for this poor guy, something went wrong somewhere along the way, and the Greek text ended up being interspersed with symbols that shouldn’t be there. I would guess that it is the result of using the wrong font on the computer, coupled together with the fact that neither party involved (the guy getting it and the tattoo artist) actually knew Greek.

The random symbols are actually meant to be diacritic marks: the ϖ  symbol should be a smooth breathing mark; the square bracket should be a rough breathing mark; the commas should be acute accents; the periods should be grave accents; the forward slashes should be circumflex accents; the vertical slash should be an iota subscript; and the equal sign should be a colon. In two words the final letter should be a sigma (ς) but is phi (φ). And then a sigma appears at the end of a word where there should actually be an apostrophe. Also, two words (on the 9th and 11th rows) are split up onto the following lines. All in all, this person should have saved the time and the trouble by just getting the Greek word for “fail” tattooed on himself.