He was the most tattooed man in Brazil until he decided to have the ink erased from an amazing 95% of his body.

Leandro de Souza had already undergone two laser sessions to attempt to remove more than two decades’ worth of tattoos; the first procedure was performed when he was just a young teenager.

The 35-year-old photographer chose to get rid of more than 170 tattoos. He was converted to evangelicalism and currently lives in Bagé, a border city between Brazil and Uruguay.

“I completed my first one when I was thirteen,” de Souza said to the Brazilian news website G1.”The idolatry of the time was a major theme in the first ones.”

The tattoos were inspired by the rock bands of the time, Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, and Nirvana.

De Souza’s life took a bad turn ten years ago after divorcing his wife.

He first dabbled with cocaine, and after divorcing his ten-year-old son’s mother, he spent nine years mixing ecstasy, LSD, and alcohol.

He remarked, “I couldn’t stand the life I was living anymore.””I felt like a circus animal at the events I attended because I was the attraction.”

De Souza gained a new outlook on life after visiting a shelter and being exposed to evangelism.

According to de Souza, “accepting that you can’t do it alone, that you are an addict, that you are a drug addict, is the first step in everything in life.”

“And I succeeded in doing so; I went into the Bagé municipal shelter. After about a week, a woman introduced me and began evangelizing me.

In an effort to alter religion, De Souza gave sermons to “parents and children in homes that are in prisons” two years ago.

A tattoo studio in São Paulo called Franco da Rocha found out about de Souza’s life-altering experience on April 14, which was also his birthday and a year without using smokes or narcotics. It has been over three years since he last had any alcoholic beverages.

De Souza still needs to attend six more classes, each lasting thirty to forty minutes. The schedule for these is every three months.

He remarked, “It hurts a lot more than doing it.””It hurts three times as bad as when you do it.” This is an extremely painful procedure, even under anesthesia.