Indian envoy warns of 'big red line,' days after charges laid in Nijjar case
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
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.”
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.”
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
The U.S. paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns that Israel was approaching a decision on launching a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah against the wishes of the U.S.
Footage from dozens of security cameras in the area of Drake’s Bridle Path mansion could be the key to identifying the suspect responsible for shooting and seriously injuring a security guard outside the rapper’s sprawling home early Tuesday morning, a former Toronto homicide detective says.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
Susan Buckner, best known for playing peppy Rydell High School cheerleader Patty Simcox in the 1978 classic movie musical 'Grease,' has died. She was 72.
Accused killer Jeremy Skibicki could have a challenging time convincing a judge that he is not criminally responsible for the deaths of four Indigenous women, a legal analyst says.
A Calgary bylaw requiring businesses to charge a minimum bag fee and only provide single-use items when requested has officially been tossed.
Two Nova Scotia men are dead after a boat they were travelling in sank in the Annapolis River in Granville Centre, N.S., on Monday.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.