You could say Jennifer Cormack is a Beatles fan.

The 28-year-old from Surrey has a 1960s-style basement housing dozens of LPs and more Beatles memorabilia than most avid fans. The walls are lined with Beatles photographs and the collectibles continue upstairs to the main floor.

"I've kind of banned myself from eBay because there's always something new and exciting that I could be spending my money on," she said with a laugh.

She also has an exclusive piece of Beatles memorabilia that no one else has: a full back tattoo of the Fab Four's instruments contrasted by colourful, psychedelic lyrical imagery.

But her tattoo is incomplete: it needs Sir Paul McCartney's signature.

"I actually could not believe it, that after all this time he was really, finally, coming back to Vancouver," she said with emotion in her voice. "Hearing the commercials that he's coming on the radio, it makes me tear up."

Cormack, who is also the road manager for The Beatles tribute act Fab Fourever, is determined to get the 70-year-old's autograph permanently embedded in her skin.

She has loved The Beatles ever since she wore out her dad's cassette tapes by listening to them over and over at the age of four.

"I can listen to The Beatles on my iPod at work day in and day out," she said. "It's never something that you get bored of because there's so much variety to their songs."

When she got the back tattoo, she originally just wanted the band's instruments: Ringo Starr's Ludwig drum set, George Harrison's Epiphone Casino, John Lennon's Gibson J-160E acoustic-electric and Paul's Hofner 500/1 bass.

But the tattoo artist, Travis Erlandson, opted to give her something brighter.

"He said, 'You know what? Let me draw something for you and see what you think,'" she recalled. "He knew exactly what I wanted, what I really was there to get."

The tattoo took 50 painful hours and more than 14 sessions, and even though Cormack said she's a bit of a wimp, it was entirely worth the suffering.

The black and gray symbolizes the early part of The Beatles' career while the vivid imagery represents their timeless music. The tattoo contains nods to "Yellow Submarine," "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," "Strawberry Fields Forever," "Glass Onion", "Octopus's Garden" and "I Am the Walrus."

Now she has a 12th-row ticket to McCartney's one-night-only concert at B.C. Place this month, and she hopes that's close enough to get noticed by the former Beatle. She's printing out hundreds of signs for surrounding fans to hold up to get Paul's attention, and she will hold up a bright sign of her own.

"I'm hoping he's going to sign just above the walrus," she said, who has already booked time for a tattoo with Erlandson the day after the show. "There's space there and it's out there in the open so I can show it off all the time.

"I'm hoping I'll be able to stay calm enough that I can at least talk and not just sit there a stunned, crying, emotional mess."

She's counting down the days to the concert on Nov. 25, which she considers to be her personal Christmas. She has every intention to leave B.C. Place with a little more ink on her shoulder.

"Every time I see it - when it happens - I'll remember the time I got to meet Paul and got him to sign my tattoo," she said.

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