Having decided on Horiyoshi III to tattoo my back, I made plans to return to Japan in 2001 for my first sessions.
I vividly remember walking up the slope from the train station to the Isecho studio. These would be my last moments without an enormous tattoo in my skin. I waited in front of the bank as instructed, where Horiyoshi's son Kazu, then a teenager, came on a bicycle to meet me. He guided me to the famously obscure studio.
Once we arrived, I restated my specifications: a dragon with black scales, red belly and yellow dorsal fins, full size with background. This was all the direction Horiyoshi needed. I would later come to believe that this is the ideal level of detail to give a professional tattoo artist. Horiyoshi rummaged around in a drawer labeled “Dragons” and pulled out a sketch of a dragon's head.
I lay down on the floor and he sketched something on me with a brush. He then prepared to tattoo whatever it was into my skin. I asked to first have a look. Horiyoshi seemed slightly taken aback but motioned toward the sticker-encrusted mirror. I saw a dragon's face with a disturbingly huge claw next to it. I commented on the psychedelic proportions. “It looks cooler that way,” he calmly assured me. I assented. You don't engage someone like Horiyoshi III and then second guess his artistic judgment. Especially if you are as artistically impaired as me.
When he started to outline my backpiece, I crossed that line, a line that over subsequent years would inexorably progress toward my extremities.
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