Brazil’s most tattooed man has shared an incredible transformation after having painful surgery to remove the ink etched across 95 percent of his body.
Leandro de Souza has so far undergone two laser sessions as part of the process to eliminate over two decades worth of tattoos.
The 35-year-old photographer, who lives in the Brazilian border city of Bagé next to Uruguay, made the decision to erase more than 170 tattoos after welcoming evangelicalism into his life.
‘I did the first one when I was 13,’ de Souza told Brazilian online news outlet G1. ‘The first ones were very much about the idolatry of the time.’
The tattoos were inspired by favorite rock banks of the moment – Nirvana, Guns N’ Roses, and Metallica.
De Souza’s went down a dark path 10 years ago when he divorced his wife.
The fallout of splitting away from the mother of his 10-year-old son resulted in a nine-year period in which he dabbled with cocaine for the very first time and then in mixed ecstasy, LSD, and booze.
‘I couldn’t stand the life I was living anymore,’ he said. ‘I was an attraction at (events I attended) and it felt like a circus animal.’
De Souza’s found a new outlook on life when he visited a shelter, where he was introduced to evangelism.’The first step in everything in life is to accept that you can’t do it alone, that you are an addict, that you are a drug addict,’ de Souza said.
‘And I managed to do that, I entered the municipal shelter in Bagé. Within a week, there was a lady who referred me and started to evangelize me.’
De Souza still has to undergo six more sessions, which are scheduled every three months and last 30 to 40 minutes.
‘It hurts a lot more than doing it,’ he said. ‘It hurts three times more than doing it. Even with anaesthesia, the process is very painful.’