Meet the completely tattooed Brazilian who removed his nose, added horns and reshaped his ears to resemble an 'orc'

TORONTO -

Fernando Franco de Oliveira is nearly unrecognizable from how he appeared a decade ago.

In those ten years, the Brazilian tattoo artist has covered nearly every part of his body in ink and undergone surgery to give himself horns, a forked tongue, pointed orc ears and even going as far as to cut off his nose.

De Oliveira, who owns a tattoo studio in the southern Brazil city of Tatui 150 kilomtres west of Sao Paulo, says he’s been primarily inspired by skull imagery and “The Lord of The Rings.”

“In a way, I'm like the main attraction of my own studio,” he told CTVNews.ca in a video interview, adding that clients love his appearance and passersby often stop to snap selfies with him.

“About 70 per cent of people who see me on the street, they want to take photos with me and they find me interesting,” he said.

While he draws stares from strangers, de Oliveira says friends and family aren’t shocked by his appearance anymore.

“Most of my friends are already used to my appearance,” de Oliveira said, adding that his family members took some time to get used to his transformation. “When I first started tattooing myself and doing all these modifications, it was a big shock to them.”

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Fernando Franco De Oliveira (@caveira5555)

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Fernando Franco De Oliveira (@caveira5555)

In 2006, he started covering himself, head-to-feet, with tattoos of dragons, clowns, bulldogs and other creatures.

His ink is so extensive that he was recognized in 2014 as the most tattooed person in the country by RankBrasil -- a Brazilian organization similar to the Guinness Book of World Records, but which only registers and ratifies records and other oddities in the Latin American country.

De Oliveira calls the eight years he spent getting the tattoos “by far the most painful experience I've gone through.”

But as he inked more and more of his body, he began altering his appearance in other ways too.

De Oliveira began by stretching out his ear lobes; then injecting ink into his eyes turning them black; adding horns to his head; replacing his teeth with vampire dentures; and even splitting his tongue in half.

He eventually covered his facial tattoos by dying his skin blue and had his ears re-shaped to resemble those of an orc – a race of monstrous humanoids who represent the corrupted versions of elves and men in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”.

“But I would have to say that the most life-impacting, impacting modification I've done was with my nose,” he said, explaining he had it surgically removed in March and it’s taken several months to heal.

“It's still very painful because when I take a shower a lot of water goes into my nose.”

As for enduring the pain of people’s judgment, de Oliveira tries not to let it bother him. Many people think he’s either a Satanist or Satan himself, he said, “because I come across as a someone terrifying.”

“But the truth is, I'm not. I have God in my heart.”

And de Oliveira says his transformation isn’t complete, as he still hopes to narrow his jaw line and get rid of excess skin to more resemble a skull, and also attach more horns to his head.

“Everybody -- most people in the world -- they're all alike. They're the same. And I wanted to be different. I want to stick out.”