There are many ways to show just how much you love your football club. The easiest is to wear a football shirt, one of the hardest ways is probably by having said shirt tattooed to your skin as one Flamengo fan did.
Mauricio dos Anjos, a 33-year-old fan of the Brazilian club, decided that for the love of his football club, Flamengo, he would get the design of their 2015 shirt tattooed to his body, only the shirt sponsors are missing from the artwork.
According to Vice news, the body art took a whole year, taking up 32 sessions which resulted in 90 hours of him being tattooed. That sounds like a lot of pain to end up looking like a £40 T-shirt.
Dos Anjos told Vice exactly why he decided to get the elaborate ‘tat’ saying, “I always wanted to have a Flamengo tattoo, ever since I became a fan as a child…I got a vulture [the team mascot] with the Flamengo shield on my biceps. Last year, I decided to get a tattoo of the jersey, which is something I’d actually been wanting to get for a while.
“But I thought it would be too expensive – between R$10,000 (£2,000) and R$15,000 (£3,000). So I chose to get something smaller, that covered only part of my shoulder and chest. The tattoo artist asked for R$800 (£165), but as we chatted he told me he’d do the entire jersey at no extra cost, just for the exposure.”
Unsurprisingly the interviewer asked if Mauricio had regretted getting inked at any part of the process but he said, ‘Trust me, I never felt any regret,’ you’ve got to love the craziness of football fandom in Brazil.
The Flamengo fan is married with three children and even had another tattoo relating to his eldest daughter inked over for the club shirt, “I have one [tattoo] for my eldest daughter – her footprint, with her name and date of birth. It was on my back, but the jersey tattoo-covered it, so I’ll redo that one somewhere else.
He revealed he still wears a Flamengo shirt twice a week, hopefully not the 2015 one, but walks around the house topless. At least he won’t be getting the shorts or socks inked on though, “I may get another tattoo related to Flamengo, perhaps on my leg or my arm. But I’m not going to get anything as big as this.” He concluded.
