This Woman Helps Domestic Abuse Survivors By Offering Them Free Tattoos

September 7, 2015

Flavia Carvalho is a tattoo artist based in Brazil. For the last two years, Carvalho has been offering free tattoos to survivors of domestic abuse in a project titled “A Pele da Flor” (“The Skin of the Flower”).

She helps women cover scars left from knives and bullets. Her goal is to turn reminders of traumatizing experiences into a stimulus for empowerment.

She told the Huffington Post: “It all started about two years ago, when I worked with a client who wanted to cover a large scar on her abdomen.”

“She told me that she was at a nightclub, and when she turned down a man who approached her, he stabbed her with an switchblade.”

“The one that shocked me the most was the story of a 17 year-old girl who dated an older man and, for months, suffered from the physically abusive relationship”

“When she saw the finished tattoo, she was extremely moved, and that deeply touched me.”

“When he wanted to break up with her, he scheduled a meeting, and after they began to fight, he stabbed her several times in her abdomen, and violently raped her”

She even does coverups for mastectomies.

This scar was the result of a bullet.

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