Take me for instance. I'm nondescript. You see me in a restaurant and it's as if I'm not there. On the one hand that's good because no one is pointing at me and making faces. I can also spill food on my shirt and no one will pay any attention. Or care, except for a stray comment like "Look John, there's another idiot with food all over his shirt."

Yet on the other hand my modern angsted ego is bruised when no one looks at me and says 'what a handsome guy.' So be it.

Now I know immediately some of you gals are going to be upset and cry sexist pig and start nagging me because I'm only talking about ugly women and not ugly men.

As a writer I write about what I know and I know a lot about ugly women but don't know much about ugly men. Most men for me are non-descript too. I will hear women remarking about how handsome a particular man is but I don't see it. I don't understand the appeal of the rough look. To me, the rough look is ugly in both men and women.

Be that as it may I do have a much better aptitude for determining what is attractive in women. Like most men, I can readily spot an ugly woman or a pretty woman.

Don't ask me why I know this or how I know this. I just know this. It's a guy thing and has something to do with the hippocampus in the brain. No one is exactly sure why but everything else goes one way or the other through the hippocampus so it is one heck of a good guess.

Besides, we guys know about a woman's look. We may not know much else about her, but we ace the looks category. That's our job. It's what we and our hippocampuses do.

Really pretty women are now getting little tiny, discrete tattoos sometimes on little tiny discrete parts of their pretty bodies. You know, the butterfly in the small of the back type of tattoos. The risk these women run is that the tattoo will detract from their beauty even when put on a particularly discrete part of their anatomy.

Not so with the ugly woman. No way. The ugly woman will get the most bodacious tattoo she can finance covering her arms, head, neck and anything else when possible. Double King Sized is her order.

The key here is to imagine the viewer's reaction upon seeing this massive tattoo, which is really the only reason anyone gets tattooed in the first place, with the possible exception of those that get large Nazi themed facial tattoos. Those with Nazi themed facial tattoos get them almost exclusively for their own self gratification.

One's first reaction is "man, something's really ugly here so it must be the tattoo." Aha. We are in the hunt now. Our tenacious research has finally led us to the crucial clue as to why ugly women get super grande tattoos.

Like Sherlock Holmes once said it's all right there in front of your nose. Ugly women get large tattoos to hide their ugliness. At least that's the strategy. The ugliness gets blamed on the tattoo and not well, the underlying ugliness or real cause of the ugly effect. In the process the tattered ego gets a facelift.

In certain urban and suburban areas of California, tattoos and body piercings have gone to the extreme. On many bodies now it's hard to find a place that is not tattooed or pierced, including major and minor body orifices and canals creating a whole new specialty branch in applied medicine.

In this attempt to create a new look the user opts for the total tattoo remake and body pierced mutilations: in short, cover up all that ugly. One of the immediate psychological benefits is a dramatic improvement in self esteem. Beware the devil you don't know does not apply to the permanently very ugly. Any change is an improvement for the desperately ugly. God knows that too.

It really doesn't matter that as these tattooed clowns age they will look like those angry aborigines in New Zealand. They probably won't remember who they are anyway or won't care even if they do remember. At that point even tattoos are secondary.

Quite frankly nobody is going to pay any attention to Granma's wrinkles if she has Hells Angels Bakersfield tattooed in Gothic letters across her forehead. And initial research shows that such tattoos are actually often viewed as attractive by those with senility, dementia and the more common senile dementia. "By golly I think I used to belong to the Bakersfield chapter - you must be my kinda girl! I can almost remember you..."

On some level it must actually work or why in God's name do they keep doing it?