Pat Vaillancourt is the current record holder for the most web addresses tattooed on his body, with over 10,000 URL’s inked on his back and shoulders. That sounds like a lot, but he’s not stopping until his body is covered by 100,000 website addresses.
In 2010, 30-year-old Vaillancourt, from Quebec, Canada, decided he wanted to set a world record of his own, and because he wasn’t an athlete and he couldn’t do extreme stunts, he chose tattooing as the way to leave his mark on the world. “I want to break a Guinness World Record, but more importantly, I want to help others. And this is my way of doing so,” he said back then. People and businesses can pay $35 to have their URL tattooed on Pat’s body and listed on his website, Back2thelight.com, with half the proceeds being donated to help the people of Haiti and Somalia. Vaillancourt says the other half is used to pay for his tattoos and promote the project. If my calculations are correct, he hopes to ultimately raise $3.5 million, including expenses.
This unusual project wasn’t Pat’s first idea of making the world a better place. He first started a website asking people to donate $10 for the Haiti Relief Fund, but that didn’t work out very well. Still he kept thinking of ways to raise money, and when he woke up one day he got this unusual idea that would allow him to reach his goal and set a new world record at the same time. He plans to have the first layer of 50,000 web addresses tattooed in black ink, and the other half tattooed in fluorescent ink that should make him very noticeable in nightclubs. He’s currently nearing the 15,000 tattooed URLs mark, and claims over 16,000 companies have already reserved a spot on his body. His friend, a tattoo artist, takes between 1 hour – hour and a half to execute 100 URLs, so Vaillancourt says the project will be completed in 10,000 – 12,000 work hours. When it’s done, Pat will be covered in URLs from his neck to his ankles.
Pat Vaillacourt is also accepting Facebook and Twitter profile URLs, so if you want yours inked into his skin and listed on his site, all you have to do is fork out 35 bucks. At least half of it will go to a good cause.
