For all my show of bravado and pompous declarations of fearlessness, I am actually a wimp at heart. I am wimpier than the proverbial 'scaredy-cat' and the touch-me-nots. Yellow, sissy, chicken, weakling, fraidy-cat, namby-pamby...but by now I suppose you get the drift.

One of my most cherished dreams has been to get tattooed. It took years of mustering courage and making three other friends get inked for me to finally manage to stagger into the snazzy tattoo parlour.

Months ago, I had been scouring the internet in search of the perfect design, but then I am not very easy to please.

"Do you have any designs I can select from?"

And the next thing I knew, I was swamped to the chin in design books, searching for anything that would catch my fancy. After about an hour of hopeless poring over countless designs, shortlisting, discarding, re-shortlisting and what not, my friend (you don't think I walked in there alone do you) had just about had it with me.

"Now you select something real quick or I'm off!", she threatened.

Suitably chastised, I quickly picked on the design that I had been eyeing for a while and decided that that was that.

The starting up of the tattoo machine was about the scariest noise I had ever heard. If you don't count the dentist's drill of course. I looked at the tattoo artist's face in the hope that he will be gentle with me, and saw this maniacal gleam of evil in his eyes.

"Oh god, I shall be very good, I shall never thumb my nose at passers-by, I shall always let elders sit on the last seat in an exceedingly crowded bus.....OUCH!"

The needle had pricked my skin. The first few minutes were terrifying as I tried to not hyperventillate and thrash about like a convict on the electric chair. But eventually, when I did come to my senses, I realised that it didn't quite hurt as much as I had envisaged. Unless he drew long uninterrupted strokes with the machine that is.

I sat there patiently, asking the artist tons of questions about the whole world while my friend thumbed through magazines. After an hour, it was over.

I am now officially stamped with a pair of gorgeous blue tulips.