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Being half of a celebrity twosome has its perks, not least of which is starpower greater than the sum of its parts. But there are certain rules that should be observed. Do not, under any circumstances, appear in a treacly magazine spread rhapsodizing about your love, or you will be broken up within a month. And please, resist the temptation to get matching tattoos, especially each other's names, as history has taught us that even the most inspiring and rock-solid romantic unions—Lindsay & Sam! Chris and Rihanna! Britney & K-Fed!—cannot survive the curse of the matching ink.

But don't just take our word for it, listen to a tattoo-removal doctor: "It's a terrible idea," scolds Jeffrey Rand of the Tattoo Removal Center. "All you need to do is look at the divorce rate [and] beyond that, the break-up rate of relationships before marriage." And obviously, celebrity relationships have an even more inevitable expiration date, unless you're Ben Stiller's parents. Who almost certainly don't have tattoos.

So what are bipolar attention-seekers with poor impulse control to do? Yet again we can look to Bristol Palin's baby-daddy and his family for moral guidance: While Levi Johnston admits that getting "Bristol" tattooed on his finger wasn't the cleverest idea, his younger sister Mercede has a great big "Levi" tattoo on her wrist! A tattoo of your sibling's name is, we're sure you'll agree, an ideal alternative: It's rebellious, yet wholesome, and saves you the trouble of explaining that your family is totally fucked up.

Lindsay Lohan & Samantha Ronson, Rihanna & Chris Brown's matching tattoos: One bad idea [NYDN]