Yoshi, a troubled teenager, is sent by his grandfather to Seijun, a highly renowned tattoo artist. Against all expectations, the boy masters the art of tattooing, including the complicated Tebori technique. Ten years later, Seijun reveals a great secret to his apprentice: his clients are from the yakuza, the formidable Japanese mafia. Each tattoo they bear has a specific meaning, often to do with the murders they've committed. When Yoshi discover that his friend is tattooed with the same strange design as one of the yakuza bosses, his whole world turns upside down...

In order to escape his violent past as an ex-yakuza gang member, Yoshi becomes the apprentice of one of Japan's greatest tattoo artists. But rather than escaping the yakuza, he finds himself constantly surrounded by them in the tattoo parlor. He then discovers that the sexy young woman he's just met has a tattoo of a strange, winged creature on her back. But Yoshi already knows this design, because it was he that came up with it for one of the yakuza chiefs. What does this mean? And what's this girl's connection to the yakuza? Little by little, Yoshi discovers a dark back-story, far worse than anything he could ever have imagined.

Though young Yoshi immersed himself in tebori, the traditional art of Japanese tattooing, in order to escape his violent past, circumstances oblige him to—reluctantly—enter the underground world of Japan's mafia, the yakuza. Haunted by a legendary creature warning of impending doom, and after discovering his girlfriend is in reality an undercover cop, Yoshi finds himself on the run, unsure of whom to trust and where to hide...