Amid conflicting reports of a 24-hour stint in rehab earlier in the week, Britney Spears returned to L.A. Friday on an American Airlines flight from Miami, surprising fellow passengers by sitting in the last row of coach class.

And within hours after landing, the peripatetic mother-of-two managed once again to shock onlookers. This time by shaving her head and getting two tattoos at a seedy parlor in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley.

Yes, friends: Shaved. Her. Head.

Usmagazine.com was there as Britney left her Malibu home Friday evening and paid a visit to a Tarzana salon for her brief stint in, uh, hair-hab.

A source at the salon says, "Britney came in and said she wanted them to shave her head." According to the source, when the hairdresser refused, "Britney grabbed the hair clipper and started doing it herself."

But Britney's night of self-defiling had only just begun.

We were there again when at about 8:30 p.m. Britney arrived at Body & Soul Tattoo in Sherman Oaks.

Store employee Emily Wynne-Hughes tells Usmagazine.com that Britney arrived at the parlor agitated and, when asked why she shaved her head, replied, "I don't want anyone touching me. I'm tired of everybody touching me."

Hughes adds, "She wasn't making sense at all and you could tell she's not in a good place at all, and that she is totally freaking out."

Hughes tells us Britney then got a black-white-and-pink cross tattooed on her lower hip and red-and-pink lips on her wrist. The price: $80.

Britney was not an ideal subject, however. "She was a nightmare to deal with," says Hughes. "She was screaming and flipping out from the pain and wiggling her body all around."

At one point during Britney's one-hour visit, Hughes asked Britney why there was a pink stain on her fluffy white handbag and Britney said she had "spilled Nyquil all over it."

Hughes, who was somewhere between appalled and concerned by what she saw, adds, "After she left the shop we all just looked around and said to each other, 'We just saw a huge celebrity on the verge of a nervous breakdown.'"

Labels: Britney Spears