Genest grew up in Châteauguay, a suburb of Montreal. According to his mother he waited, out of respect for her and his father, until the age of 16 to get his first tattoo. He then left home at 17 after graduating from high school, but it was not until the age of 21 that he would first come to Montreal tattoo artist Frank Lewis, since then responsible for inking the majority the designs on his body, which they create together. This has taken over three years, Genest spending thousands of dollars on the artwork, conceived by him to be “about the human body as a decomposing corpse – the art of a rotting cadaver.”, and “also a tribute to horror movies”, a favourite genre of his. He would become popular in Montreal’s “underground scene”, but struggled for money and eventually found himself homeless.
