The Chinese people have a highly developed writing system that evolved at least 3000 years ago. Ancient writing has been found written on bone, brass vessels or pottery and bamboo strips.
The Chinese writing system has no alphabet, but relies on a large number of symbols that represents spoken concepts or ideas. It is important to note that a Chinese symbol is NOT a pictograph but represents the entire spoken word.
And don't even look for the Chinese alphabet because there isn't one. The alphabet is a Latin invention, which is a whole new can of worms.
The Kangxi Dictionary was created in 1710 A.D. by imperial decree to compile 47,035 symbols. Don't worry; the average Chinese person only needs to know five thousand symbols to pretty much read anything that is written in the Chinese language.
Now, let's talk about mistakes which is the biggest block when someone thinks about getting a Chinese symbol tattoo. What you think the Chinese symbol tattoo means, may not be necessarily so.
As you can imagine, before rushing off to get the Chinese symbols tattooed on your skin - DOUBLE CHECK with someone who CAN read and understand Chinese. And resist the urge to pull over the Chinese waiter and ask him to write out the Chinese symbol for you. He may not know exactly what meaning you really want and may unintentionally give you the wrong symbol.