My assumption has always been that Jeph was aware that that particular character could mean both "princess" and "concubine", and that was the hidden humor behind it.
I've never been sure how far Jeph's playing with Raven's tattoo is intentional. In its first appearance the tattoo was in Chinese (
公主) while Raven
thought it was Japanese, and I assumed that was part of the joke considering the general cluelessness of getting tattoos in a language you cannot read. Jeph has now corrected the tattoo to
姫, which is the Japanese variant of the Chinese
姬, (which, as you point out, is pronounced
jī and can indeed mean "concubine"). Playing with multiple meanings of characters is a very Chinese thing to do, and certainly in Raven's case the double meaning is very
appropriate, so maybe Jeph is slipping us a
Bilingual Bonus. A third, rather archaic, usage of
姬 means "female entertainer", which is also remarkably apposite. Props for taking the trouble to include the tone number in your romanization BTW, though I prefer the more elegant diacritics even if they are more difficult to type.
And yeah, Dora has
already met Herr Beardedgalleryguy, so why the reaction? Does he have a German accent, prompting Faye's Teutonic thank-you? Did Faye learn more than swordsmanship from
Dietrich Himmelfeuer? Will Dora get her 10% commission? Curious minds want to know.