Julia Gnuse Gets Guinness World Record for Most Tattooed Woman in the World

Tattoos are a form of expressing oneself, it is often being said. Permanent tattoos allow the wearer to make a statement or simply to do something that sets them apart from the rest of the crowd. Whatever the reasons most people have when they get tattoos, they couldn’t possibly coincide with that of Julia Gnuse, who has just been named the most tattooed women in the world, the Herald Sun informs.

Gnuse did not deliberately set out to win this distinction from the Guinness Book of World Records, since her motivation to getting so much ink was purely a practical one. As per her own words, she suffers from a skin condition called porphyria and she started getting the tattoos to cover the scars caused by it. Initially, she only had a few on her legs but she became so addicted to ink that, soon enough, she had 95 percent of her entire body covered in body art.

“Miss Gnuse, from California, started getting tattoos on her legs after developing a skin condition called porphyria, which causes the skin to blister when exposed to sunlight. She then turned her attention to her stomach, arms and back and before long was addicted to body art. In an interview, Miss Gnuse said although the ink did not stop her skin from blistering, it covered up the scars and allowed her to be exposed to the sun,” the Herald Sun writes.

“I did this for the reason of covering scarring from the blisters. They get as deep as three degree burn. I had a friend who is a plastic surgeon, who suggested tattooing my skin the same color to the scarring that I had, seeing if we can match my just pale-looking skin that I had. That didn’t work. We tried it. It was very difficult to match that. So I had the idea of a colorful tattoo, then I got hooked. I got addicted,” Miss Gnuse explains.

Julia Gnuse unveiled her tattoos (not all of them, of course) in New York, at the BookExpo, the aforementioned media outlet says. They range from floral motifs to cartoons and drawings of her favorite actors and all of them have been done by one tattoo artist.