The tattoo artist who did Atletico Madrid forward Mario Mandzukic’s back has not be named, but he or she probably isn’t moonlighting with the Academy of the Hebrew Language.
During Tuesday’s Champions League game against Real Madrid, Mandzukic’s jersey rode up his back while he was lying on the pitch, revealing a tattoo of a sentence containing Hebrew letters arranged in what, to someone unfamiliar with Hebrew (like Mandzukic?), appeared to be words.
The sentence is a version of Nietsche’s famous saying, “What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.” Except the Hebrew on Madzukic’s back reads, in translation, “What not to kill me, will make me stronger.”
Another flaw is that the Hebrew sentence is tattooed left to right, i.e. backwards – amounting to pure gibberish: “Regnorts em ekam lliw, em llik ot ton tahw.”
