Chinese Tattoo translation

Before taking suggestions from people who give free advice, it's prolly safer for you to explain your family's background: which Chinese language they've been speaking all their lives, which part of China they originated from, and which "ethnic" or clan group they identify with, etc... Might also be a good idea to see if you can find any paper work like marriage certificates or old passports squirreled away somewhere...

It's entirely possible that, because the family name is a two-character name, somebody will come up with an idea right away, but it's prolly not a good idea to take a chance...

Tattoos can be forever, and a source of some amusement for Chinese walking past you on the street...

Just some friendly advice from someone who doesn't even know you...

TBZ 

After this comment, I'm going to leave this up to the people who actually know what they're talking about...

It appears that you know even less than I do about what I'm talking about. And I don't mean that as an insult. Hyphens and spacing have nothing to do with Chinese, and here, even less to do with English. And Southern China, Guangdong, doesn't narrow things down much at all. Do words like Toishan (Taishan), Teochow, Hakka, Min Nan Yu, Hokkien mean anything to you at all? It seems there's been quite a bit of distance between your generation and original assimilation. 

My advice on the best place to start is with the actual paperwork of your ancestry test. Unless it only consists of a blood test, there must be some concrete information there. I'm afraid you're gonna have to get a lot more information from your family, especially previous generations, before I'd trust any advice you get here...

For your sake, I'm bowing out at this point. Maybe some "heritage learners" can step in from here, and let you know how to query previous generations of your family to get the information you need to proceed...

Good luck, and be sceptical...

TBZ 

as it's unlikely it's a compound family name, I wonder if the 'shing' is just 姓, which leaves us with ho, which could be a number of common surnames, perhaps 何，胡

For the sake of the original poster who may have no understanding of how Chinese works, let me add that a Chinese name or word spelled in English letters may correspond to two, three, four or even more different Chinese characters.

Thus, going backwards from the English spelling of a single syllable (assuming Tomsina is correct) to what the Chinese character for that word or name might have been is very likely to be highly speculative or downright wrong.

I'm sure this is not what you want to hear, but that's how it is.

I'm going to add, that one of my British Chinese friends had a "surname" for almost thirty years that was actually part of her grandfather's first name. Whichever colonial official who wrote it down when he emigrated didn't know anything about Chinese names or name order, and her parents apparently never picked up the mistake (both grew up speaking Chinese but have largely lost it after 40 or so years in the UK). So for years she was going around with a surname that was likely the equivalent of "Boris". No one picked it up for years. So it's really important to trace back those original documents and cross reference everything. On some level you may never know, and you may feel comfortable "reconstructing" the most likely surname from the face value information. But I personally would be uncomfortable doing that without first exhausting all other avenues and means of finding the 'truth' of what it was originally.

Prolly somebody on a forum dedicated to Egyptology would be a good person to start with. If you're interested in walkin' like an Egyptian, covered with tats correctly written in whatever language(s) ancient Egyptians expressed their angst in, this isn't the place to look for help, although it's a very friendly place to learn about the Chinese writing system.

Although Egyptian hieroglyphs share many characteristics with Chinese written symbols (including use of pictographs (at least in the original form of the symbol), a lack of intrinsic hardcore phonetic connections between those pictographs and pronunciation, etc., ad infinitum), it's more common to refer to Chinese written symbols as "Chinese characters." Hard core linguists in the depths of their research papers may use the term "hieroglyphs," but it's not in common use around here, and will cause a lot of confusion. Maybe a visit to a website like Wikipedia might be a good idea.

And your lack of awareness of the above difference leads to a desire to caution you about permanently inking something you know so little about on your skin. There's more than ample opportunity for embarrassing mistakes. There is a website named something like "Hanzis Matter" dedicated to memorializing the unfortunately hilarious mistakes others in your situation have made.  

Help will hopefully be at hand as someone else chimes in with more specific advice (both pro and con), so I'm gonna leave any further comment to them.

Be caaarefuull...

TBZ

Ho Shing    何成    常见组合，寓意“有所成就”
Ho Shing    何星     比较文艺，适合名字
Ho Shing    侯升    比较少见，但语音匹配
Ho Shing    胡盛    意思好，有“昌盛”之意

@HoShing

An embarrassment of riches...

Looks like you've got a 25%chance of choosing a name that just might be, maybe, on a good day, possibly in contention for the name your family left China with all those years ago... Their heads and hearts were prolly full of dreams...

But, as you don't seem to read Chinese, the second column provides random possibilities for your family name from a native speaker, and the sentence in the third column provides that native speaker's comment on that particular suggestion. There is absolutely NOTHING to connect those names to your family. It's still a good idea to take the advice given to you by the various contributors above...

Just sayin'...

TBZ