Take any decent-sized group of people and the chances are you’ll find one of them has modified their body in one way or another.
I don’t mean anything drastic – we’re not talking the removal of limbs or the splitting of tongues here – but rather that the individual in question may have decided to take a liberal approach to piercings or tattoos.
My point is, people adjusting their outward appearance to reflect the creativity they have within is nothing new. Folk might experiment with body art, change the color of their hair, undergo a radical shift with regards their wardrobe and fashion choices… you get the gist.
Yet going so far as to make oneself almost entirely unrecognizable is not the usual path people tend to go down, which makes it all the more eye-catching when someone does.
Quest Gulliford, of Las Vegas, Nevada, reportedly began his journey of body modification back in 2009. Since then, he’s spent an eye-watering $70,000 on countless tattoos and procedures aimed at altering his physical appearance.
Today he’s barely recognizable as the man he once was… and his pre-radical tattoo pictures are truly something.
According to man himself, Quest’s first tattoos were to commemorate the battle with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma that he survived while in seventh grade. To that end, he inked himself with the words “God First” and a cross on the left side of his chest. He later added a purple cancer ribbon.
He might not have known it at the time, but it was the starting point of a journey that would lead Quest to viral fame and social media stardom. Today he has over 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 per the Daily Mail.
“It was about six months of chemotherapy. I kind of felt like a superhuman after that.”