Leandro de Souza was 13 when he got his first tattoo. He never stopped. He ended up covering 95% of his body, including his face, with more than 170 designs. He was crowned the most tattooed man in Brazil.
Behind the ink were nine years of darkness. Cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, alcohol, a divorce that dragged him down. Each tattoo was another layer of armor over a pain that couldn’t be seen.
The way out didn’t come from a doctor or a luxury clinic. It came from a municipal shelter in Bagé, where a woman named Taís invited him to a church. Fifteen days later, he was baptized.
That’s where the hardest part began: erasing himself. Not because he was ashamed of who he had been, but because he wanted skin that wouldn’t remind him of the war he had won. He began laser sessions at a studio in São Paulo, which provides them for free.
“The pain is horrible”, he said. It hurts more than getting tattooed, even with anesthesia. He has undergone five sessions. There could be eight in total. Each one is a repeated decision: keep going.
Today he has a formal job. He said they gave him back his dignity. No one gave him a new life: he is fighting for it with laser, session by session, until only the skin he chose to have remains.
