A TATTOO addict who had 95 per cent of his body covered in ink looks unrecognisable after undergoing treatment to have them removed.
Leandro de Souza, 36, once known as Brazil’s most tattooed man, is in the process of having a staggering 170 designs painfully lasered off.
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Each session lasts up to 40 minutes and is even more painful than getting inked, he said.
On Thursday, tattoo-obsessed Leandro shared a photo on Instagram of his face after his most recent laser session next to a snap of him covered in ink.
He wrote: “‘After the fifth session of facial tattoo removal, @helltatto – gratitude, it’s about Jesus Christ.”
The shocking picture shows Leandro’s scarred bare face with a few remnants of the ink still snaking up his neck.
He told O Globo: ‘It hurts a lot more than doing it. It hurts three times more than doing it. Even with anaesthesia, the process is very painful.”
The 36-year-old, from Bagé a Brazilian city next to Uruguay, was just 13 when he first got inked – drawing inspiration from rock icons in bands such as Nirvana, Guns N’ Roses and Metallica.
But it was when he and his wife divorced some ten years ago that he began manically covering his whole body in the ink to cope with his lack of self-confidence.
His tattoo obsession grew so deep that Leandro never had to pay for his face tattoos.
He told CNN Brazil: “I got paid by the tattoo artist I worked with. And I regretted it. I was the most tattooed man in Brazil, and I also tattooed others.”
The fall out also resulted in an almost decade-long period attached to booze and alcohol and feeling like he “couldn’t stand life anymore”.
Finding work proved difficult and the tattoos started to make him feel like “a circus animal”.
After seeking comfort an evangelical group and driven by the need to secure a proper job to support his son, he began the long and painful process of having his tattoos removed.
He said: “I didn’t feel good, it didn’t suit me anymore. It was a world of excess, which no longer did me any good. There came a time when I felt like a circus attraction.”
His transformation comes as the UK’s most tattooed man revealed what he looked like before covering every inch of his body in ink and fans can’t believe it’s the same person.
Mathew Whelan, 45, from Birmingham, who legally changed his name to King of Ink Land King Body Art The Extreme Ink-ite, spent a whopping £40,000 and more than 1,600 hours under the needle.
Now covered head to toe in black and grey body art, from his shaved scalp to the soles of his feet, and even his eyeballs, resurfaced photos show just how much he’s changed.
Snaps from when he was just 16 and 18 show the now-inked-up icon with a fresh face, buzz cut, and smooth skin.
In one shot, a young Mathew poses proudly with his very first tattoo which was a bulldog on his arm.
Fast forward nearly three decades and he’s had his eyes permanently dyed black, nipples removed, ears reshaped, and almost no visible skin untouched by ink.
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