A Connecticut Army veteran has tattooed and modified 99.98% of his body, taking home two Guinness World Records — and still saving space for more.
Esperance Luminesca Fuerzina has been officially recognised as the most tattooed woman in history, and the most body modified woman, after a decade-long project that involved tattooing her eyeballs and having scale-like implants injected into her scalp.
“I think it’s clear that I’m not trying to conform to traditional beauty standards, which is both liberating and something that a lot of people don’t understand and can see as negative,” Fuerzina says. He told Guinness World Records.
According to the new record holder, her body represents a moving canvas in keeping with the theme of “transforming darkness into beauty.”
The artwork features inked tongues, gums, eyeballs and even genitals.
But Fuerzina didn’t stop there: she also boasts 89 other body modifications, including 15 subdermal implants, a forked tongue, nipple removal, and 18 genital piercings.
Fuerzina was not afraid to undergo extreme changes in the most delicate parts of her body, which helped her surpass her record-holding predecessors.
The Army veteran narrowly beat out the previous most-tattooed woman, Charlotte Guttenberg, who has 98.7 percent of her body inked, but Fuerzina easily smashed the body modification record: the previous record was just 40 tattoos, and had stood since 2012, waiting for the Connecticut woman to break it.
According to the new record holder, her path to becoming a title winner was merely by chance.
For more than 10 years, Fuerzina had been drawing and scarifying her body with pictures of friends and memories from her world travels, before a friend told her she had a chance to win the title.
“I was a little nervous at first,” Fuerzina admits, reflecting on the application process, “but I wanted to show the strength and potential of women by applying for the record myself.”
Her love of tattoos began when she got her first one at age 21 – a symbol of a past relationship on her lower back, which she quickly covered up.
Fuerzina started with split tans and then moved on to body mods a few years later.
She mostly draws her own pictures, but often invites her trusted tattoo artists to use her body as a drawing board and let their creativity flow.
Even now, with so little space left on his body, Fuerzina shows no signs of slowing down: “It’s still hard to imagine a set ending in terms of how my body is covered.”
“Of course, we’re not done yet!”
