Very few people have, in body modification, pushed the boundaries so extensively as Marcelo “b-boy” De Souza Ribeiro.
São Paulo, Brazil 40 year old artist has taken years to transform his appearance into becoming a living canvas.
Ribeiro has about 98% of his body covered in over 1,500 tattoos, fanged metal teeth, skin implants and a bifurcated tongue.
From 15 years of age, he began his first tattoo and has embarked on a journey of body transformation that would go on to define his life.
Over the years Ribeiro expanded the modifications to include elf like ears, a tattooed tongue and subdermal implants on his forehead and arms.
In fact, he thinks of his body as an ‘art exhibition,’ and believes that he will spend £29,000 (around $35,000) on all the body art.
“I was already research body mods in the world,” he reveals, as his mission was to become first at things and things never done before.
His boldest experiment was a surgical procedure of a kind he had never had before.
Recently, Ribeiro chose to make some changes to his left hand by going through a series of elaborate surgical steps.
The process was done in three one-hour sessions anesthetized by a trusted friend.
Excess fat and tissue were removed to slim out the structure of the hand as it prepared for the transformation.
The next step was an unprecedented change in which he could laterally open and fold his hand in two directions.
Ribeiro’s hand movement itself, he says, remains “completely normal” and his procedure has apparently not impacted his hand’s mobility.
And his modifications go farther than that; he has removed his index finger and redesigned his hands into the shape of the alien devil that he imagines himself to be.
He said he is happy with what he has done, and his family understand and are supportive of his work.
Ribeiro says he had planned these radical changes so carefully and was so pleased with the results.
But the people say the most modified man alive is Ribeiro, while the Guinness World Record is still held by Germany’s Rolf Buchholz.
Until 2012, when he held 516 modifications, from implants to piercings, which was a record not updated officially.
But Ribeiro’s hand-splitting method is one of a kind in the body modification world.
For his work, he has been garnering a lot of attention online and now has more than 75,000 followers on Instagram where he shows what his art form looks like.
Ribeiro’s incredible story to date has sparked conversations about body modification, self expression and individuality and people keep tuning into the news.
The first ever surgical split of a hand was the first kind of its kind, a surprising twist made by Ribeiro.
It is another layer to his status as trailblazes defining body art on its most extreme scale.
Marcelo “B-boy” De Souza Ribeiro’s path forces us to consider the perimeters of art and place, and finds the limits of what our bodies can do.
Feature Image Credit: (Instagram/@marcelobboy)