A voice from the dead. But who speaks from behind the veil? Phil Sparrow. Needle-name of Blackwell Wren: writer, pornographer, sex outlaw, tattoo artist who would "tattoo anything on anybody anywhere." Intimate of Gertrude Stein and Thomas Mann. College professor who flushed his PhD diploma down the toilet and descended into a cutthroat world of sleaze, cheap vulgarity, skid row. The world of tattoo. In the shadow of the waiting-to-explode West Oakland ghetto, amid the political upheaval of Berkeley in the 60s, a nihilistic art student, Nick, makes his pitch to Phil. An experimental film shot in the tattoo parlor capturing the ebb and flow of outlaw bikers, treacherous lesbians, a charlatan Satanic priest, malevolent cops, and one cold-blooded killer. When Nick stumbles on Phil's bludgeoned body in a pool of blood, he is faced with a choice: the duck-it road, or the road to a police jam and all the trouble that goes with it. Nick chooses trouble and is transformed by it...