04/17/2026
What a transformation.
At 13, Leandro de Souza got his first tattoo.
By his mid-thirties, 95% of his body was covered in ink — face, scalp, eyelids, hands. More than 170 tattoos. In 2023, he was officially crowned the most tattooed man in Brazil at a national tattoo expo.
But behind the ink was a story most people never saw.
A marriage that fell apart. A spiral into drug addiction. A stretch of homelessness that landed him in a shelter. A man who had become, in his own words, "a circus attraction" — noticed everywhere, belonging nowhere.
Then, in that shelter, something unexpected happened.
A woman began sharing her faith with him. Leandro listened. And slowly, something shifted inside him that no tattoo artist could ever reach.
He converted to evangelical Christianity. He quit drugs, alcohol, and ci******es — overnight, he says. He began rebuilding: finding work as a photographer, fighting to regain custody of his elderly mother, providing for his son.
And then he looked in the mirror.
The man staring back no longer matched the man he had become.
So he made a decision that stunned everyone who had followed his story for years.
He began removing all of it.
The process is brutal. Each session requires three separate lasers on the face alone. The skin blisters and burns. Even with anesthesia, he has said, the pain is "horrible." He estimates it will take up to eight full sessions — and a specialized studio offered to do it all for free after a testimonial video he posted went viral.
Session by session, the ink is fading. The face that was once a billboard of a former life is slowly clearing.
He is not bitter about the tattoos. "I don't condemn tattoos," he has said. "I believe that after baptism and conversion, there are more important things for us to do."
He is now preparing to begin theological studies on a ministry scholarship, with plans to do missionary work — possibly in Africa or Brazil's most remote regions.
"One day I was rescued from the streets, from addiction, from prison," he said. "Wherever God leads me, I want to go."
He once stood out because of the ink.
Now he stands out because of what he is becoming.
"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new." — 2 Corinthians 5:17
People are not frozen in their worst moments.
No matter how permanent the past seemed — it can change.
And sometimes the most powerful thing a person can say is simply:
"I am not who I used to be."
