Take any decent-sized group of people, and you’re likely to find that some of them have altered their bodies in one way or another.
I don’t mean something drastic – we’re not talking about removing limbs or splitting tongues – rather, the person in question has decided to take a liberal approach to piercings or tattoos.
My point is that there is nothing new about people changing their outward appearance to reflect the creativity they have inside. People can experiment with body art, change their hair colour, radically alter their wardrobe and fashion choices… well, you get the point.
However, getting to the point of making yourself almost completely unrecognisable isn’t exactly a path people usually take, and it’s even more eye-catching.
Quest Gulliford, from Las Vegas, Nevada, reportedly began his body modification journey back in 2009. Since then, he has spent $70,000 on countless tattoos and procedures to change his appearance.
Today, he’s barely recognisable as the man he used to be… and the photos of him before his radical tattoos are truly something to behold.
According to the man himself, Quest got his first tattoos to commemorate his battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which he endured while in seventh grade. To do so, he inked the words ‘God Above All’ and a cross on the left side of his chest. He later added a purple anti-cancer ribbon.
He may not have known it at the time, but it was the starting point of a journey that led Quest to viral fame and stardom on social media. Today, he has more than 1 million followers on TikTok and over 250,000 on Instagram.
‘I had a big lymph node growing… I didn’t think anything of it,’ he said, as reported by the Daily Mail.
‘It was about six months of chemotherapy. I felt superhuman after that.’
What followed his first tattoos was a whole catalogue of designs on his body. He even had a tattoo artist stick a needle into all sides of his eyeballs to make them black.
‘The day I went to the parlour in Houston, Texas, it took me a long time to get in the mood to get it done,’ he said, as reported by the Mail.
‘It’s not really like a tattoo on the skin, it’s more like an injection or modification.’
Quest may be covered in hundreds of tattoos now, but he recently posted a series of photos that document his adventures from the beginning, showing his development over a ten-year period between 2009 and 2019.
What do you think of Quest’s tattoos? Could you imagine getting an eyeball tattoo one day? Tell us about it in the comments.
