A Thousand Deserts

When someone says they are from Brazil, an image usually forms at once: warm music spilling from crowded streets, a vibrant and colorful culture of festivals, laughter, and beaches lined with tanned beautiful people.

I am not from that Brazil.

I was born in Rondônia, a state on the western edge of the country, where the maps grow vague and the land seems more forgotten than celebrated. My hometown is Rolim de Moura, a small place of some forty thousand souls. In truth, even this is a kind of fiction: Rolim had no maternity ward when I was born in 2001, so my mother had to travel to the neighboring city of Cacoal to bring me into the world. Technically then, my birth certificate carries a city I never really belonged to. My home has always been Rolim de Moura.

Childhood in a small town is both a gift and a limitation. There was so little, and yet i had everything. I remember playing until dusk with the neighborhood children, riding bicycles down unpaved streets, launching kites into skies that seemed too vast for their fragile frames, and sometimes spending hours digging holes in the dirt roads as if we could burrow into another world. I also drew constantly, but every child draws.

Perhaps the only difference between artists and the rest of the world is that the artist is simply the child who refused to stop.

At seven years old, my parents moved us to Porto Velho, the capital of Rondônia. It was no metropolis by any means, at least compared to the great cities of the world; but to me, it was an overwhelming expanse of people, streets, and noise. The change was not gentle: where once my friends had joined me in chasing frogs and riding bicycles until our legs gave out, the children of the city seemed uninterested in such things. My innocent amusements no longer belonged. At the same time, my parents’ marriage unraveled, and divorce introduced into my life the first clear fracture of family. This combination left me as the “weird kid of the class”, the quiet one who no longer fit anywhere, the boy on the margins even among his own peers (subtle foreshadowing).

This coincided with the rise of the internet in the late 2000s, and I became fascinated with making videos for fun. I never had success with makng content though, but I fell into video editing, digital art, and specially Photoshop, which soon became more than a tool. I constantly catched myself “thinking photoshop”: visualizing the interface of the software inside my head and editing stuff mentally. It was like an extension of my body, a phantom limb that acted with the same autonomy as my hands.

By my teenage years, I even took on a part-time job as a graphic designer. But the glamour of “working with art” revealed itself quickly to be an illusion. To design is, more often than not, to serve the whims of others and to reshape your vision into a form your client can tolerate, even if it is ugly, even if it is soulless. I became a craftsman of demands, producing uninspired logos for restaurants and trivialities for businesses, longing for freedom while chained to utility.

When I finished high school, I left home for the first time and moved to Curitiba, a city far in the south, to pursue a degree in graphic design. It was the furthest I had ever been from Rondônia. But only six months later, the pandemic began and all the world collapsed into silence and isolation. Alone in that distant city, locked away from human connection, I felt once more what Rondônia had always whispered to me: the sensation of being in limbo, of sitting endlessly in a waiting room for something that never arrived.

In truth, Rondônia itself is limbo. Geographically, it lies between two great ecosystems: the Amazon rainforest and the cerrado, the tropical savannah of central Brazil. Yet it belongs fully to neither. Culturally, it is a place without a clear face, without a single myth to unite its people. We are the children of immigrants from everywhere and nowhere, abandoned in this liminal in-between land and were left behind to its vague inheritance. We were born stranded, as if the land itself did not know what to make of us.

After six months in Curitiba, weary of solitude and disillusioned with my studies, I abandoned the city and returned to Porto Velho. I came back with no plans, no career, no clear purpose. And so, almost by accident, I began tattooing. My father helped me bought a cheap tattoo machine online, and I practiced on synthetic skin, then on my own legs, then off the skin of friends; and before I realized it, I had become the apprentice of the nearest tattoo studio.

Yet tattooing, too, bore the same truth as design: however much I wanted to create art from my soul, in the end it was the client who decided. I spent months tattooing derivative fineline pieces just to pay my bills. It was no different from producing uninspired restaurant logos. The tools had changed, but the chains remained.

Being an artist in Rondônia was like planting a field with hope, tending to the soil day after day, only to realize the earth itself was barren. You could labor endlessly and never see the fruit you longed for.

This truth crystallized when I first visited São Paulo, arguably the heart of Brazil’s cultural life. There, I met tattoo artists who lived as I had dreamed: choosing their work, pouring themselves only into what they loved, and being rewarded for it. They were, in a sense, harvesting what I had prayed for but could never grow in my own soil. Meeting them planted a seed in me: the resolve to leave Rondônia behind.

But even as I was preparing my escape, something else began to stir within me: a call quieter than ambition, stranger than desire, and more mysterious than any plan I could devise. Though I was not raised in a religious household by any measure, I found myself slowly and irresistibly drawn toward Catholicism.

There was no single revelation, no dramatic conversion; rather, it was like the steady rising of a tide. In time, I chose to join my local church, not as a matter of inheritance or tradition, but as an act of surrender, of placing myself before something infinitely greater than I.

Inevitably, my faith began to reshape my art. I turned to the study of sacred images, of Byzantine icons and Christian symbolism. For the first time, I felt my work connect with a language older than myself and through symbols, I could reach beyond the visible and touch the transcendental.

Funilly enough, this estranged me from my tattooer friends. The others around me fit the image of rebellion, counterculture, or nihilism that so often surrounds tattooing, but I carried with me a more faith oriented version of this. That alone was enough to set me apart, to make me once again the strange one on the margins. A living marriage of two seemingly opposite things, a concatenation of a dichotomy, as if even contradiction itself demanded to be chained together.

In time, it was not São Paulo that became my destination, but Madrid. My mother, who had lived in Spain for some years, had received citizenship while I was planning to move out of Rondônia, and through her, I found a way to step into Europe. I left Brazil, not with bitterness, but with the quiet knowledge that I had exhausted the soil of my homeland.

Now I live in Madrid. Here, at last, I tattoo only what truly matters to me. My work is filled with sacred imagery, Catholic devotion, large blackwork that speaks of mystery and silence. In this place, far from where I began, I continue to search; not for recognition or glory, but for a way to bring my art closer to the eternal, closer to the truth I now know lies beyond me.

Arriving here just as my heart was turning toward Catholicism does not feel accidental. Europe, with all its contradictions, is undeniably Christian in its bones. The churches that rise above every city, the blood of martyrs that once washed the stone-paved streets of this land, the relics that rest in silence beneath altars… They are not accidents of history but reminders of a continent that once made the sacred the very center of its existence.

To find myself here, in the aftermath of the start of my walk with Christ, feels less like coincidence than a kind of divine arrangement. Yet I know better than to imagine this land will necessarily bear fruit for me. To be a pilgrim means to accept uncertainty: that I may labor here and see nothing grow, that I may remain a foreigner until the end. My task is not to demand that the soil be fertile, but to keep walking, to keep creating, to keep offering what I can with humility, and to let His will be done.

I do not belong fully to Brazil anymore, and I will never belong entirely to Europe. Perhaps I will never belong to any land at all. I am a tattooer who does not fully belong to the tribe of tattooers, a Christian in a secular age, an immigrant on a foreign land. But pilgrimage is not about belonging. It is about moving forward, one step at a time, carrying the weight of exile yet trusting the road that is set before me.

If my life remains a succession of limbos and deserts, then let each be another station on this long pilgrimage, where my art and my work, as small and imperfect though it is, might serve as prayer, as offering, as a gesture toward the eternal that alone can satisfy.