tattoo
Explanation
The Joke
The comic opens with a narrator saying, "Sometimes I want to get a tattoo of the word 'strength' just so I can make this joke over and over." In the panel, someone asks a man about his tattoo, and he proudly replies, "In English, it means 'strength.'" The tattoo on his arm simply reads "STRENGTH" -- in plain English.
The Humor
This is a reversal of the extremely common real-world phenomenon of people getting tattoos of Chinese or Japanese characters and then explaining to others what the characters mean in English (e.g., "It means 'strength'" or "It means 'courage'"). The comic flips this cliche by imagining someone getting the English word itself tattooed and then delivering the exact same explanatory line, which becomes absurd because the tattoo is already in English and requires no translation. The joke highlights how the pretentious ritual of "explaining what your foreign-language tattoo means" is really just a way of saying you wanted the word "strength" on your body -- which sounds much less exotic and impressive when you skip the translation step. The narrator's admission that he wants this tattoo specifically to make this joke repeatedly adds another layer, suggesting the whole thing would be a long-running performance art piece of anti-humor.