Chinese characters are usually read in order from left to right, top to bottom. This reading order is called "vertical character order".
So we can read Chinese characters in this order without any problem in most cases.
However, in some special cases, the reading order of Chinese characters may change. In some ancient documents or inscriptions, the order of reading Chinese characters is from top to bottom and from right to left.
Another example is that every Spring Festival, Chinese people like to put up spring scrolls, which are read in right-to-left order.
For example, the above spring couplet reads out as "八方财宝进家门，一年四季行好运。"
Based on the different reading order, some Chinese characters can express different meanings in different reading order.
For example, "牛奶", read from left to right means milk, and read from right to left means cow.
Therefore, if you want to tattoo Chinese characters, you still need to pay attention to the combination order of the characters.
A famous case is Justin Bieber's tattoo of the Chinese character "怂". Anyone who knows Chinese understands that he wanted to tattoo the character "从心", which means to follow one's own heart, but he combined the two characters in a top-to-bottom order and it became the Chinese character "怂", meaning incompetent.
