Lucky Diamond Rich, the world’s most tattooed person

Lucky Diamond Rich holds the Guinness book of world records for being ‘the world’s most tattooed person’ since the year 2006. The title was previously held by Tom Leppard (more popularly known as the ‘Leopard Man of Skye’) of Woodbridge, Suffolk.

Lucky Diamond Rich was born in New Zealand in the year 1971. As you might have guessed that’s not his real name. He was born Gregory Paul McLaren. As a young boy Lucky read a lot about the most tattooed mean and women and soon found himself intermittently thinking about being one himself. His dreams did not go much further till he got his very first tattoo at age 17. It was of a tiny juggling club located on his hip. “It made me feel a little better, changing myself” he said. Today his whole body (including the inside of his mouth, ears and even foreskin!) is 100 percent tattooed.

For lucky tattoos had become a way of dealing with life – “For me, pain … that has been my dance most of my life. I did not value myself … but the more I accepted the pain, the easier it is to deal with the pain. Tattooing, the obsession, it became the best way for me to deal with what I had come from.”

“My most painful body change? My mind. Learning to live with myself, daily, to the best of my ability,” he answers without a hint of doubt. “The dichotomy of me is that it’s taken me to behave physically this way to reach normality” Lucky said in an interview.

When asked how people react to his unusual form he said: “Yes, I am very confronting to a lot of people. But asking me how people react to me is like finding one word to describe the weather: it rains, it hails, it’s thunder, it’s lightning, it’s calm, its sunny,” he said yesterday. “It is the full array of reaction and expression I get from people. My biggest lesson in life now is to accept whatever it is …”

Lucky is as known as much for his circus acts as much as he is for his tattoos. After his stint with major circuses and travels, he has retired as a street performer. His acts include unicycling, juggling and sword-swallowing.

Watch this: Interview with Lucky Diamond Rich