with a two-inch wide band of intricately patterned freehand flash. Once he was done rubbing the transfer paper against her skin, Masafumi stepped back to view his efforts, and make sure all the elements of each design had successfully spotted onto her skin. For his part, Ulger squirmed around in one of the tattooing chairs, eyes narrowed, upper lip curled back over his flat-bottomed, oyster white teeth, breath coming in short noisy hitches through his flaring nostrils. He had accepted Masafumi’s terms readily; if he was allowed to watch the “tattoo-boy” apply four around-the-limbs tattoos to Harumi, he would be given that elusive nano-yarn-sweater...if he never bothered Harumi again. And if he were to break his promise, and continue to harass her, the real police would get a call, reporting a non-official bearer of the otherwise restricted body armor nano-weave.
Luckily, Harumi’s limbs were thin, and the single-needle black outlining of her tattoos went quickly, if somewhat awkwardly (to allow him to tattoo the backs of her thighs and arms, she had to lie face down on the tattooing bed, resting on her already-inked limbs), and once the outsides of each new leaf, each new flower were inked, Masafumi switched to a seven-needle cluster, to create the background wash of color...given that his needles touched his previous finely incised inked lines with every pass, it was inevitable that Harumi’s eyes began to water, even as she defiantly refused to let out a sound, least she increase her audience’s pleasure at her discomfort. Masafumi could hear Ulger’s panting breaths over the drone of the tattoo gun, and when he was done laying down the pale greenish-white background (which rendered some of the single needle fineline a subtle shade of grey), he gave Harumi an I’m so sorry wince, as he put a three-needle tip onto his tattoo gun, and began inking in all of the deep green leaves.
Five more colors later, and countless swipes of his now-bloodied wipe cloth, Harumi’s limbs shone with brilliant, slightly-raised bands of color...the merest hints of a far more intricate design not quite fully seen “beneath” her previous tattoos. But her fleshy kimono was now layered, and as she gingerly walked toward the mirror on the back wall of the shop, ignoring Ulger’s wolf-whistles in her direction, Masafumi pictured her wearing a real kimono, over her tattoos...but one made of a transparent fabric, gauze, or perhaps even un-cut sheets of that nano-fabric those factories made in bulk. This was the answer to his imponderable quandary, that unbridgeable gap between the artistic vision and the material reality. A design that literally moved as the woman wearing it moved, even as she still maintained the formality of the now-outdated kimono’s restrictive T-shape....In his excitement, he almost forgot about Ulger sitting there, waiting for his “payment” that evening, so beautiful was Harumi, in all her inked glory. Only her pale shorts and narrow tube top marred the perfection of her fleshy garment, but didn’t Ignazio tell Masafumi that the people who attended those Tattoo and Body Art conventions often took the judging stage all but naked, to better show off their ink? If Harumi would allow him to create additional “layers” of kimono on her skin, could she not wear a transparent kimono when taking the stage?—
“I’m outta here...Masa, you’re the man...and Walker...what can I say? You ain’t,” Harumi hissed the last two words through a tightly puckered pair of red-shaded lips, then, after blowing a kiss to Masafumi, quitted the parlor, stepping raw and bandageless into the early evening street beyond. Sure that she would be able to tend to her own fresh tattoos, Masafumi slowly turned his attention to Ulger, who was busy fishing something out of his breast pocket...a syringe, filled with a pale clear liquid. Grinning and squinting at Masafumi, Ulger said, “I do guard duty for that pharmacy down the block...and I know they ain’t gonna miss this. Just like I know you ain’t gonna say squat about me using it, right?”
Realizing that whatever Ulger had stolen had to be an anesthetic, the one thing forbidden to anyone undergoing non-medically sanctioned body modifications, Masafjumi merely shook his head, disgusted by the man’s cowardice, yet simultaneously elated by the sight of Ulger feeling his own neck for a vein, then shooting the contents of the syringe into his body. And from what Ignazio had told Masfjumi, nano-tube implantation was far less painful than even the smallest tattoo could ever be. Wanting to snap, Too bad you didn’t bring enough to share with Harumi, he instead waited until Ulge’s eyes grew dazed, and his head started to loll, before saying succinctly, “Remove your shirt. And put your arms on the armrests. Another thing...you’d best not try to speak as I work.”
With the cheerful obedience of a cow marching along the slaughterhouse tunnel, Ulger started to say “Ok” then substituted the finger-sign for Ok instead...before his eyelids drooped down low over his eyes, and Masafumi told himself, This...will be so good....
* * * *
Through Ignacio’s magnifying goggles, the skin of Walker Ulger’s neck became a landscape of raked sand and occasional rock-like protuberances, dotted with short scruffy shafts of kelp-dark grass-hair. And as he minutely scored and hash-marked that barren soil of enlarged pores and pliant flesh, Masafumi forced himself to think of rough fabric, something not supple enough for a kimono, but perhaps suitable for an obi, that which surrounds and binds the layers of a kimono into a whole...and as he worked, incising, and laying down strands of nano-ribbon which looked nearly hair-thick under the most extreme magnification his lenses allowed, his artistic urges overtook his utilitarian purpose, as his realization that this was not a job meant to protect one who needed genuine armor, but merely a prop meant to prolong Ulger’s delusions of legal servitude, began to guide his hand, so that his efforts transcended their agreed-upon boundaries....
...and when he was finished, and had slathered the freshly-laid nano-ribbons with post-tattooing ointment, and bandaged over his creation, he kicked the bottom of the chair, to rouse Ulger.
“All through.”
“Uhmmmp? You done? I got my armor?”
“It is within you. Although the addition of an actual vest will greatly augment the protective element.”
Oblivious to Masafumi’s irony, Ulger shakily got up off the chair, and as he gingerly felt the bandages which criss-crossed over his neck, shoulders and under his arms, said, “You know where Harumi went to?”
That Ulger would ultimately seek to break his promise had been a given to Masafumi, but the quickness of his turnaround did rankle Masafumi, who replied, “No...and if I may remind you—”
“Nope, I didn’t tell you you could say squat to me.” Masafumi watched as Ulger labored to pull on his shirt, offering no help to the man as he struggled, other than to mildly suggest, “A beer might make whatever pain comes later go away.”
“Nah, I’m gonna get me some saki...and I’ll bet Harumi will be there to serve it to me, won’t she?”
Harumi had said nothing to Masafumi about her post-tattooing plans, but he doubted that she would consider working another shift that night, but he smiled and said, “Perhaps she will be. You should go then?”
“Damn right...and I’m gonna show everyone there what I got goin’ for me now. Teach them not to take me serious as a security guard. Once they see what I’m packing, they’ll take me real serious....”
With that, Ulger stepped out the door, but when Masafumi hurried over to peer through the sides of the drawn shades, he saw the rent-a-cop wannabe ripping and tearing at his gauze bandages, until they trailed over his shoulders like the fluttering tail of a squid.
It took all the resolve Masafumi had within him to resist the urge to follow the man into the restaurant, to watch the horrified reaction of those Japanese-reading patrons and workers when they saw what was nano-embroidered into Ulger’s flesh...the precisely drawn symbols for “I despise Japan and all that is Japanese” across his neck, or, if he managed to get his shirt off (or if it was removed for him), the phrases “I seek to destroy all Japanese women” and “Death to Japanese men” on each shoulder, or the best ones of all along the bottom of each armpit: “I am worthless slime” and “I am unworthy to live.”
Just as the long-ago Tokugawa Shogunate had inevitably spawned a far different, yet equally—if not more—involved form of kimono decoration, so Masafumi had decided that the current ban on non-police-officers obtaining a suit of nano-body-armor should also spawn a more decorative, if less protective, variant.