No, absolutes are incredibly rare. If you're asking "always" or "never", there will typically be exceptions.

I have a friend who got a Chinese letter tattoo on his arm.

It was supposed to say "Strength" or some such, but it was actually the word for "arm".

no but for many they do. I have known people with complicated patterns and complex stories around them and lol I was drunk.

No. I have a star shaped tattoo. Because I like star shapes.

Depends how strict you mean. A friend of mine got a stickman on his index finger and a trampoline on his thumb so he can pull them together and apart to make the stickman bounce on it.

It's funny, but it's also extremely meaningless. Technically the meaning could be fun but I don't think there is a real one.

So no. I personally prefer tattoos on myself to have meaning, but I also heard usually the more tattoos you have the less important meaning becomes and lots of times people do it because it looks cool. Especially broad patterns and things like sleeves lean more into a design than into meaningful motifs, so that's a whole category of tattoos that doesn't necessarily have a meaning. And that's only a small part of tattoos.

In practice, sure—if nothing else, it means they wanted a tattoo. The mere presence of a tattoo has some cultural relevance, even if the particular design is otherwise meaningless. (Unless they got it involuntarily like an Auschwitz tattoo, which still has meaning of a different kind.)

No, not always. People get tattoos for all sorts of reasons.

I personally have tattoos that are memorials, are rites of passage, or are reflections of my philosophies. I also have flash tattoos that I got on a whim.

It's expensive, a lot of pain and time... so it's usually a safe assumption that it has a meaning to them. But obviously like everything it's not universal.. clearly there is a (hopefully small) percentage of people who get a tattoo because of a random drunkin whim, or to impress someone etc...

Yeah, it means they got a tattoo

There was a tattoo parlor near my house that had a gumball machine with a bunch of stickers in it. Put a quarter in the machine and they would give you a discount on a tattoo with that design on it.