Asian Character Tattoos

I used to study Japanese, so if I was going to get an asian character tattoo, it would be using Japanese characters rather than Chinese. I know they look really similar, and are sometimes the same (though they are pronounced differently), but at least with the Japanese characters I could look up the meanings easily in my reference books just to make sure I don’t get something that I don’t like tattooed on me. I never know whether you can trust the tattoo artists when they tell you the tattoo meanings, and this way I would know the meaning for sure.