The Man Who Became His Own Tattoo
Once you decide to cover your entire body in tattoos, you’ve stopped making a statement and started becoming one. There’s no revision, no rethinking it in five years. The skin is the work, and the work is permanent—and if the concept is coherent enough, systematic enough, the result isn’t a canvas covered in images but a person transformed into something else entirely.
Rick Genest looks like a zombie. Not in a vague, edgy way—in a specific, anatomically committed way. The skull cap appears to be gone. The jaw is rendered in rot. The bones are mapped across his arms and chest with the kind of dedication you usually only see in medical illustration. He’s twenty-five, Canadian, soft-spoken in interviews, and reportedly described as "cute" by women who apparently have a type. The contrast between the voice and the face is genuinely strange.
He got his first tattoo at sixteen, out of consideration for his conservative parents—waiting until he was technically old enough to make a decision they couldn’t fully stop. By his early twenties he’d spent over $7,000 on ink, most of it done by Frank Lewis out of Montreal. What emerged wasn’t a collection of tattoos but a coherent character, an identity worn on the outside of the body like a second skeleton.
Before any of this led anywhere professionally, he was working freak shows. We traveled all over North America and I was always the tattooed guy,
he said. The fire-eater. The blockhead. But at some point I had enough and wanted to start my own thing.
You can hear the logic in that. The freak show is someone else’s stage; at some point the freak wants his own billing.
The fashion industry found him and did what it does: made him the season’s beautiful outsider. Thierry Mugler put him in campaigns. The Paris and Milan weeks had him on runways. The glossy magazines discovered the shy boy from Montreal and printed his skeleton face between perfume ads. Lady Gaga, who has always had an eye for exactly this kind of iconography, took an interest.
What fashion does with figures like Genest is a familiar story. They need the freak for a season or two—need the contrast, the shock, the proof that they can hold transgression in their hands without flinching. And then the cycle moves and the freak gets recycled out, and the industry goes looking for the next body it can briefly make its own. Rick Genest’s advantage, and also his trap, is that his look doesn’t change. You can’t update a skeleton. The tattoos that gave him entry to this world are exactly as fixed as the bones they depict. The fashion circus will move on when it’s ready. The zombie will remain.