The 50-Euro Deposit I Never Collected

At 18, I paid a 50-euro deposit at the tattoo studio around the corner and never went back. I’d wanted a few black stars and a crescent moon on my upper arm. The appointment was booked, the money was down, and then I stood in my apartment for a week, paralyzed by a single question: what if I stop caring about celestial bodies? What if I’m the kind of person who changes his mind about things? What if I am—and I shudder to type this—not actually a star-and-moon guy?

Yasmin Shizue clearly arrived at a different answer. The Brazilian tattoo artist wears her own work and the work of others openly—symbols, messages, natural forms layered across her skin like a running index of the things she’s decided to care about permanently. She’s not hedging. Photographer Erika de Faria shot her for C-Heads, and the images have that quality where the tattoos feel like part of the light rather than marks sitting on top of it.

Yasmin started as an assistant in a studio before opening her own—the serious route, not the shortcut. Erika describes her linework as coming from drawing, from a fine-brush sensibility, with elements of nature recurring throughout: plants, animals, forms that predate the machines used to put them on skin. There’s a coherence to it that most tattoo portfolios lack, where you can trace the artist’s actual obsessions rather than just their technical range.

I still haven’t gotten a tattoo. The deposit is long gone. But looking at work like hers, the hesitation feels less like wisdom and more like cowardice dressed up as taste.