The Circus of Horrors is a touring extravaganza, packing the house wherever it goes. The show includes all sorts of characters with all sorts of body piercings and tattoos. But the star of this show is 37-year-old Garry “Stretch” Turner, and his wild skin-stretching act. Turner suffers from an extreme case of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that can severely weaken a person’s joints, blood vessels and in Turner’s case, skin. The disorder, which most commonly attacks a person’s joints, affects about one in 10,000 people.
The skin on Turner’s body is truly elastic. “If [you] … look at your own skin cells under a microscope, they’d be nice and round and lock in many places. … But my skin cells tend to be more jagged, and don’t fit together quite so well,” he said. “The best way to describe it is I’m built rather like a badly woven basket, if you can imagine that, which will pull apart.”
This could make tattooing a little difficult.
Most people consider Garry Stretch eerie, but as a latex mystic and yogi I somehow just find him cute.
And do not try to tatoo him! His skin has the texture of a medical latex glove or balloon and may easily burst like one when anything stings or cuts into him. In a TV docu Garry explained that once the entire skin of his upper arm tore off when some drunk idiots in a pub pulled at it with their body weight.