Tattoos Rick Genest Zombie Boy Part 2

When he was a kid, he had a deep love for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and he said he wanted to live in the sewers like them. Growing up, he found an amazing attraction for zombies. He’s a great fan of George A. Romero’s Living Dead movies, and he decided one day to look like a zombie.

Rick reached out to Canadian tattoo artist Frank Lewis when he was 21 years old, where they started working on Rick’s ideas together to bring out exactly what he wanted on his tattoos. He started by getting his hands tattooed with the outlines of bones, and after a rough time with his mother about his future and after she saw how committed he was in bringing outside what he wanted, she fully supported him during a transformation that has lasted 6 years and is still going.

In 2009 he played a background role in Circ du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, and he started gaining notoriety thanks to a Facebook page created in 2010,which discussed his taste for tattoos. This page went on to have over 1.5 million fans and one of those days Nicola Formichetti, Lady Gaga’s fashion director, stumbled upon his page, and he got in contact with Rick. In January 2011, Rico headlined Thierry Mugler’s Fall/Winter fashion catalog,leaving an incredible impression of everyone.

Rico’s pursuit of modifying his body to look like what he loves the most only shows a strong and committed personality that doesn’t pay attention to what anyone else does or says. He’s a perfect example of not judging a book by its cover, specially after we saw a video of him doing anti-bullying talks at schools.

Tattoos Rick Genest Zombie Boy

Rick Genest was born in August 7, 1985 in Canada. He comes from a working family, and he’s the oldest of 2 brothers. He has always been a particular person with a very strong personality, and got his first tattoo at the age of 16.


Moving out of his house when he was 17, he started to hang out with the punk rock crowd in  Montreal, living and surviving in abandoned buildings and housing, he got his street skills honed in while he was growing with a tough and hard to understand crowd of people, who baptized him with his nickname “Zombie Boy”. He respectfully waited until he was 18 years old to get his second tattoo, and he started envisioning what he had inside: an amazing love for zombies and the undead, and he brought it to life using his skin as a canvas and tattoos as paint.


When he was a kid, he had a deep love for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and he said he wanted to live in the sewers like them. Growing up, he found an amazing attraction for zombies. He’s a great fan of George A. Romero’s Living Dead movies, and he decided one day to look like a zombie.

Old Man Full Body Tattoos

Ten years ago tattoo95fr had already begun to his journey towards a full body suit, here he is today, in all his glory.

Massive Facial Scarification

This has to be one of the largest examples of [voluntary] skin removal on a face to date, at least in a single session. It was done by Iestyn Flye –who is normally based at London’sDivine Canvas, but tours extensively so visit him on Facebook for more information no matter where you might be on Marc at Copenhage Body Extremes (bodyextremes.com). The design is based on a Japanese holy hemp leaf pattern. I can’t wait to see this healed, and will definitely post a follow-up when I can (although if you look at the previous scar that runs across the nose, you can get a good idea of what to expect) I expect the sort of visage that looks like Freddy Krueger from a distance, and then transforms from horrific to beautiful as you get closer. Click for a larger look.

Tongue piercings and climbings

I got a message from Heather Simone this morning asking me how common multiple tongue piercings were, and I totally brushed it off “psshaw! lots of people have two tongue piercings, get over yourself!” and she replied with something like “oh, because I have THIRTEEN OF THEM and I wondered how common that was”

Of course I was, like, “THIRTEEN?!?! Well why didn’t you say that in the first place!”

I don’t think thirteen is a world record, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are less people with ten or more tongue piercings in America than there are States in the Union (although that’s a bad metaphor as she hails from Leighton Buzzard, England) Heather’s piercings are much, much more unique than I’d given her credit for.

I asked her to tell me a little more about them, and she tells me that initially her plan was to get six of them, in a cross shape, but by the time she hit that goal she was totally addicted and now the design motif is something closer to “where will they fit?” The piercings are all done in 14ga, and as she’s gotten more of them she’s had to start putting smaller beads on the bottom to keep it all comfortable.

Her first six or so tongue piercings were done by “varying artists” that she “barely remembers”, the next few by Blue Jigsaw, and since then the most recent four are self done. I asked her if her speech or anything else is affected by having so many, and besides the healing period (“and sometimes not even then”), the answer is no.

In addition to the twelve vertical bars, Heather also has a rare horizontal tongue piercing, done about ten years ago by Mark Stubbings it actually took her a year to find him after first seeing horizontal tongue piercings on BME and deciding she had to have one. That said, of all the piercings she says the horizontal was the most trouble, including biting through the PTFE bar that she initially wore in it but it settled down and it’s still there, making this project all the more unique.

As to how far she’ll take it? There’s no upper limit, so she says it’s really just a matter of how many seeing how many she can fit without it starting to majorly affect eating or speaking!

In addition to the picture below (which she adds looks a little off because some of the bars are longer than they need to be), you can see videos of her 6th tongue piercing, her 7th and 8th tongue piercing, as well as her 9th tongue piercing on YouTube.

Dominick Arduino, piercer at Starlight Tattoo (starlighttattoo.com) in New Jersey just topped Heather with this photo of one of his customers (who you may recognize from the BME galleries due to the distinctive jewelry and remember, they can key your car with their tongue if you say anything bad!). This photo, taken last year, shows it with sixteen piercings sixteen spikes capable of turning fantasies into nightmares but since then they have added two more (and I am sure will do more after that). I’ll update with a more recent photo when I am able.

Personal Evolution Tattoo

Sorry it’s been a while since I posted one of these (click here for the full series) as always, this series seeks to show people with significant facial modifications, with photos showing where they started and how they got to where they are now. If you’d like to be in a future series, please get in touch with me I’d like to keep this series going! In any case, here are today’s personal evolutions (click to zoom in):

The Evolution of Iestyn Flye

The Evolution of Jason Sand

The Evolution of Jester Mayhone

The Evolution of Revina Lower

The Evolution of Victor Peralta

Adding and Subtracting Tattoo

A few days ago I was out to dinner with old BME friends, and one conversation that came up was some of BME’s old April Fools articles. I think my favorite was “Love At First Bite” because it was so believable and fooled a good percentage of even the most experienced readers… But the article that started BME’s pranks was one first published April 1, 1999 — “Adding and Subtracting” — and one of the reasons it was so successful was that it was not just BME’s first joke article, but was published in an era before April 1st being a day where the entire web was flooded with nothing but jokes, making the whole thing less convincing. Anyway, since I couldn’t find this article in BME’s public articles, I’ve decided to republish here for historical reasons! After the article you can also read some of the responses the article generated, including a multitude of requests for interviews includingDetails, ICON, and The Village Voice.

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Ryan and Dave are the most unique identical twins you’ll ever meet. After tiring of piercing, tattoos, and implants about three years ago, they began exploring much heavier surgical modifications. Dave had spent two and a half years in pre-med at Queens University in Kingston, and using contacts made both there and online he and his twin brother have changed themselves in ways far beyond anything anyone else has ever attempted

RYAN: I guess when we were about thirteen we started getting tattooed. This is when we were living in Phoenix. I won’t deny that we had pretty poor judgement and got some pretty bad tattoos. Luckily, they were fairly light and over time we got some real nice coverups, as you can see.

DAVE: Our lives in Phoenix were actually pretty rough and our parents knew that we were running with the wrong crowd, so when we were sixteen they sent us to live with our aunt in Toronto Canada it was a bit of a culture shock but turned out for the best. I finished high school at the top of my class and was offered a biology scholarship at Queens University which soon transitioned into Pre-Med. Ryan stayed in Toronto and got hooked up with the piercing scene.

RYAN: Some friends of mine were just setting up a new studio Dave and I had been doing piercings on our friends for about a year, and it just seemed like the right thing at the right time so I decided to become a piercer. At this point the piercing community was pretty young and it was an “anything goes” scene and still mostly underground I got to meet a lot of guys into amputation and castration and really heavy stuff. It got me thinking a lot about what we wanted to do with our own bodies. I introduced Dave to them as well and he shared my feelings.

BME: What happened next?

Ryan “holding on to” Dave’s arm.

RYAN: After discussing and thinking about it very seriously for about a year, we decided to take the big step. To put it simply, Dave had his entire right arm (since we’re left handed) amputated at the shoulder and we surgically reattached it immediately behind my right pectoral muscle.

BME: Wow. If I wasn’t looking at it right now I’d never believe it. How was the procedure done?

DAVE: Obviously there was no clinic willing to do a procedure like this (we didn’t even bother to ask), so we had to do it all under local anaesthesia since we simply didn’t have the facilities to safely administer general anaesthesia. We had a group of two practitioners and two assistants working on us. First we elevated my arm and using an Ace bandage we slowly squeezed all of the blood out of it. Then we tourniquetted as high up on the shoulder it could be, and injected lidocaine into the exsanguinated veins. Almost immediately there was no feeling whatsoever. An amputation knife cut through the skin and muscles, and a bone saw did the final removal. Bleeders were ligated and the wound was cleaned up. This entire part of the procedure took about forty minutes.

RYAN: At the same time as Dave was being worked on, the other practitioner and his assistant prepared the attachment site on my chest. Veins and arteries were spliced to supply blood to Dave’s arm and the skin and some of the subcutaneous tissue was peeled up to merge as smoothly as possible. Luckily the healing went smoothly. The transplant healed up in about a month, as did Dave’s stump.

BME: You’re a bit vague as to who did it. Who were the “practitioners” and how did you find them?

DAVE: When we had the procedure done we signed non-disclosure agreements and legally swore to protect the identities of everyone involved. As far as how we met them, you’d be amazed how many kooks you meet in med school. That’s as far as I’m willing to go on that question; I’m sure your readers will understand. This type of procedure is simply not acceptable.

BME: Did you have any difficulties with rejection?

RYAN: That’s the nice thing about being identical twins! We share the same genetics!

BME: You can’t be that identical You’re wearing glasses and Dave isn’t.

RYAN: Dave wears contacts; he’s vain. Anyway, because our genetics are the same, healing a transplant is no more difficult that healing a severe laceration. I’m exaggerating a little, but it’s not the same as a regular transplant.

Left: Dave, Right: Ryan

BME: The arm is amazing, but I’ve got to admit that this “alien finger” thing you’ve done is really something. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s actually quite disconcerting!

RYAN: Yeah, we’re very proud of it. When people see the arm, they think it was an accident — transplants like this do get done every once in a while for medical reasons. The finger though, that’s art. We challenge anyone to take body art to a higher level.

BME: How did you pull this one off?

DAVE: First we removed the centre joint of my finger, along with the skin and just over an inch of overhanging tendon. Then we split Ryan’s finger at the end of the first joint. It was relatively easy to insert the extra joint, especially since we had so much extra tendon to play with. The amazing thing is that Ryan actually has feeling in the end of that finger now — the nerves were compatible!

BME: Dave, why are you wearing a bandaid over your stubby finger?

DAVE: When we put my finger tip back on, minus the middle joint, we didn’t have enough tendon to work with so I don’t actually have very much mobility in it. I tend to bang it a lot. We’re actually going to remove it altogether and remove the bone right down to the wrist. That will let us shift the little finger over without much apparent scarring giving us a very realistic three fingered hand.

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BME: Can I ask what the two of you do for a living? I assume you don’t have regular jobs.

DAVE: We make a great living in the traditional world. I’m not going to say the name of our company, but to suffice it to say that we’re the sixth largest producer of adult entertainment software in North America. The Ferrari Dino 246 that Ryan is leaning on right now is a $50,000 car. That may not seem like a lot of money, but we paid it off in one day. Not all “freaks” are punk kids.

BME: I know you don’t really like talking about this that much, but… why?

RYAN: First and foremost, we consider ourselves artists. A lot of our friends and associates who have similar interests have a more fetish oriented body modification attitude about it — while we respect that point of view, it’s not what we’re about.

BME: Any regrets?

DAVE: I guess I’m the one that should answer that one. No. Not at all. We share everything. I don’t feel that I’ve given anything up. I’m not sure if anyone who’s not an identical twin can really understand the strange bond that’s going on here. I’ve never had a phantom limb pain. It really feels like it’s all still a part of me.

BME: What modifications does the future hold for you two?

DAVE: We’ve got some genital work planned that’s pretty exciting. As soon as it happens we’ll be sure to update BME readers with some photos.

Endless wonder Tattoo

While Shannon is still out I wanted to drop in with a photo that was submitted to BME yesterday.  I found it quite beautiful and wanted to share.

This was sent in by Pink_Jonka in Croatia.  There is something so serene about it.  While I’ve never suspended, I have been there for several suspension events and there has always been something really beautiful about the atmosphere, the way everyone comes together and supports one another, that I really love.

Tattooing on a Baby

An incredibly disturbing video probably the most offensive tattoo video to date is currently doing the viral rounds. In it, the tattoo artist (whose face we never see), tattoos what appears to be a small “666″ on a toddler that screams in pain and terror while he’s doing it. A woman that I assume is the mother is holding the child down the whole time. Since there is parental consent in the process, it is 100% legal. Arguably this isn’t any worse than the doctors that have have cut off the ends of millions if not billions of baby boys’ penises to satisfy their parents religious or cultural leanings, and of course there are indigenous cultures (many of them idolized by the “modern primitive” movement) all around the world that do a wide variety of heavy mods on babies and children… But wow… I don’t think I could bring myself to be involved in something like this, either as the artist or the parent. But I wonder how many of you who are willing to denounce this video are also willing to denounce the tribal cultures who do similar things in much larger quantities and to a more horrific extent, or even denounce circumcision which is still commonplace in America (although not many other Western nations at this point as the cruelty and needlessness is recognized)?

YouTube pulled the video — click here to download our backup or play it here:

 If I had to guess [edit #2: this is now confirmed, and if you listen in the video you can hear them say that the child is now "blessed by Jesus"], I would say these people are followers of Jose Luis de Jesus of Growing in Grace. Followers of this fringe religion often get666 tattooed one them as a part of their faith. The question is, do you believe in freedom of religion? Where is that line drawn for you? This group even has billboards around Toronto where I live this isn’t just some isolated event. Below are some other similar tattoos done by their followers:

 

Trying to find examples of tattooed children in Western culture, I was hoping to dig up an old story in BME’s old newspaper archive of historical mod stories because I remembered one about a father taking his identical twin sons to a tattoo artist in order to get a beauty mark tattooed on one of them as a way of telling them apart more easily. Anyway, I couldn’t find the actual article I was searching for, but I did find another from the October 19, 1899 Twin City News which mentions how an increasing number of parents are tattooing their children with a hidden ID mark (I believe this was in the midst of abduction paranoia).

Also, I mentioned above that the parents were “100%” legally in the right (although not ethically in my opinion), but I should point out that there have been cases for example, this North Carolina mother arrested after allowing her 11 year-old to get a tattoo of a small heart on her shoulder that suggest the opposite. However, courts in America are very unlikely to call the actions of an established religion “child abuse”, so don’t expect to see Jews being jailed over circumcision any time soon.

Mitt Romney face tattoo man does an about face

Critics of Mitt Romney accused him of being a flip-flopper. Now one of his die hard supporters is guilty of the same charge.

Eric Hartsburg, the 30-year-old resident of Michigan City, Ind., inked the Romney/Ryan campaign’s distinctive “R” logo on his face this fall to support the Republican ticket. Hartsburg put the space on his face up for sale on eBay and was paid $5,000 to get the 5-by-2-inch tattoo. After the Romney-Paul Ryan ticket lost on Nov. 6, Hartsburg had no regrets, telling POLITICO he was “glad to know that I did all that I could” and insisting he would never have the tat removed.