The First Session
The man's back was a canvas of extraordinary quality — smooth, unmarked, the skin holding a tension that Takeshi associated with athletes or monks, people whose bodies are instruments maintained with disciplined intention. Takeshi began with the outline of the dragon's head, the tebori needles moving through the skin with a fluidity that startled him. In twenty years, he had never experienced such cooperation between tool and surface, as though the needles knew the path before he drew it, as though the skin was not receiving the ink but calling it home.
By the third hour, the outline of the dragon's upper body was complete, and Takeshi sat back on his stool to assess the work with the critical distance that his master had drilled into him decades ago. The lines were clean, precise, alive with the particular energy that distinguishes hand-poked irezumi from its machine-made counterpart. But as he studied the emerging figure, he noticed something that made the sweat on his palms turn cold. The dragon's eye — which he had drawn as a closed lid, a circle with a single curved line — was open. The pupil was visible, black and wet and focused on something beyond the surface of the skin, something that existed in a dimension Takeshi's training had not prepared him to perceive.
He said nothing to his client, who lay face-down on the table with the patience of a man who has endured far