'No pain no gain' rendered into archaic-flavoured Japanese. Twelve characters of awkward.

What a Japanese person actually thinks
Reads like a fortune-cookie translation — the grammar is doing a costume drama while the sentiment is doing a bench press. Genuinely odd.

Meaning

Literally: without pain + there is nothing gained
Actually: A stiff, pseudo-classical rendering of an English gym slogan. Parseable, but nobody has ever said this.

Scores

Naturalness●●●●●

Constructed. The なくして…なし frame is literary and doesn't sit with the gym-poster content.

Coolness●●●●●

Twelve characters, six of them hiragana. As a tattoo it's a paragraph.

Watch out

highLong mixed-script phrases are the highest-risk kanji tattoos — more characters means more chances for the artist to get one wrong, and hiragana blurs fastest.

Get this instead

艱難汝を玉にす kannan nanji wo tama ni su
hardship polishes you into a jewel

A real Japanese proverb saying exactly this, with actual literary weight.
臥薪嘗胆 gashin shōtan
enduring hardship for a long-held aim

Four characters, classical, and the story behind it is worth telling.

On skin

痛みなくして得るものなし

Orientation: vertical

N/A — change the words.