No offence to the tattooed amongst you but I'm really not a fan of the body art phenomenon.
I would never put one on myself for a variety of reasons: I don't find them attractive, I could see myself regretting it and I've got a very low pain threshold.
But I also think it would hamper my future employment prospects - Canada may be ready for a pot-smoking prime minister but I don't think they'd accept one with tattoo sleeves.
But I digress.
I know I am on the wrong side of the tattoo debate. It seems everybody these days is getting one: the young, the old, white collar, blue collar, female and male. In fact, according to a recent Ipsos Reid survey, two in 10 Canadians (22%) have at least one on their body while 11% have multiple tattoos.
A good friend has eight (I've only seen six of them) and she tells me that tattooing is the ultimate form of self-expression. She says that each tat' has special meaning to her and that all eight, collectively, are representative of who she is as a person.
"My body is a canvas," she says.
In that vein, my colleague opposite and I thought it would be a good time for us to tattoo each other - if only in our minds and on this page.
Designing tattoos for him wasn't easy. I mean how do you decorate a left-leaning, anti-American, staunch union man?
I think I would start with the hammer and sickle - symbolizing the power of the working class - right above his left eyebrow so he could see it every time he looked in the mirror.
I would then put a replica of Mount Rushmore on his chest. But instead of the great American presidents, we could put all the great NDP prime ministers. There was oh, wait, there haven't been any NDP prime ministers.
How about a Mount Rushmore theme with his two favourite provincial NDP leaders? Glen Clark as captain of a fast ferry and Adrian Dix forging a memo?
And maybe on his back we put a tat' of Mike Harcourt shovelling money off the back of a truck to symbolize his tax-and-spend ideology.
Now, that's art.
