Hi, I'm Mika. I make pots for a living, and apparently I make questionable decisions in my spare time, because I just spent four and a half years (and an amount of money I refuse to add up) getting a full Japanese bodysuit. This is the blog I wish I'd found before I started — the actual version, with the ribs and the bank balance left in. If you're thinking about doing this: read it all first. Then probably do it anyway.
The consultation, aka the day it got real
Booked a consult with Hiro half expecting to chicken out. His studio in Collingwood is tiny and spotless. He looked at my body for a solid twenty minutes without saying a word — which, awkward — and then went "your shoulders are a bit asymmetric, the dragon has to account for that." Cool, thanks, now I'm thinking about my wonky shoulders forever. He drew on me with a marker for an hour while we talked about flow and water and where muscles attach. Left covered in marker, deposit paid. No backing out now.
Mood: Bricking it, but buzzing.
First session: my calf vs 5 hours of tebori
First tebori session and the sound surprised me most — no machine buzz, just this rhythmic tik-tik-tik-tik that's weirdly relaxing until you remember it's needles. Five hours. The calf honestly wasn't bad, like a long sustained cat scratch. Hiro outlined two koi swimming up through rapids and the lines came out so clean they look printed on. I cried a bit in the car after. Not from pain — just hit me that I'm actually doing this.
Pain: 4/10 — calf's pretty forgiving. The Achilles bit made me swear though.
Healing: Cling film for a few hours, then Bepanthen. Tender for about 3 days.
Mood: Emotional in the car park, not gonna lie.
Both legs outlined (and the session I nearly tapped out)
Legs are coming together — phoenix tail wrapping round the right thigh, koi up the left. The backs of the thighs though? Genuinely rough. Hiro reckons that's where most people think about quitting and yeah, session 6 I asked him to stop early. He just quietly packed up, no drama, but I felt like such a wuss. Came back the next session and did the full five hours out of pure spite. Sometimes spite is a perfectly good reason to finish a session.
Pain: 7/10 — back of the thigh and inner knee are nasty.
Healing: Learning my own patterns — left side heals faster than right, no idea why. On zinc now because the internet told me to.
Mood: Stubborn as hell.
Legs fully outlined — first proper 'oh wow' moment
Both legs done in outline and standing in front of the mirror is genuinely surreal — from the waist down I look like a woodblock print came to life. Koi up one leg, phoenix down the other, blossoms and wind bars tying it all together. Hiro calls the outline the skeleton; everything after this is the flesh. Taking two months off before we start the back so my legs can heal properly and I can, you know, mentally gear up for getting my spine tattooed.
Healing: Full outline settled in about 5 weeks. Lines are crisp.
Mood: Stupidly proud. Keep catching myself in shop windows.
The back begins (spine pain is its own genre)
First session on the back, dragon outline. Hiro works centre-out, spine first. Spine pain is a completely different animal — not sharp like the legs, more this deep resonant thing that feels like it's rattling your whole skeleton. The dragon's head sits between my shoulder blades, mouth open, heading down toward my lower back. Three hours. Now I can literally feel it when I move — twist, and the dragon twists with me. Sounds dramatic, it's just nerve endings, but still.
Pain: 6/10 — spine's deep but doable. Shoulder blades are bony and mean.
Mood: Weirdly into it.
Back outline done + a hidden detail I didn't ask for
Eight months on the back and the outline's finished — dragon through clouds, wind bars, lightning, the lot. Hiro snuck in a detail I didn't see coming: a tiny temple bell tucked into the cloud forms near my right shoulder blade. He says every bodysuit should have a secret, something only the wearer knows about. Obsessed with this. Nobody's ever going to spot it unless I point it out, and I kind of love having one part that's just mine.
Mood: Soft about it, honestly.
Gakubori — the bit that makes it look like a bodysuit
Background shading — gakubori — and this is the step that turns 'big outline' into actual irezumi. Hiro packs graduated grey into all the negative space around the dragon, darker toward the edges, and suddenly the whole thing looks 3D. The dragon pops off my back. Catch though: you're going back over skin that already got wrecked by the outline, so it hurts more and heals slower. I've stretched the gap between sessions to a week each and started sleeping like a starfish because lying on my back is off the table.
Pain: 8/10 — reworking outlined areas is a real step up.
Healing: Longer rests now. Unscented moisturiser religiously. Stomach-sleeping = impossible.
Mood: Just gritting through this stretch.
Back finished. Onto the arms.
Back's done. I turned around in Hiro's big mirror and genuinely didn't clock myself for a second. It's huge — dragon from shoulder blades to tailbone in dense cloud and lightning. He cracked a beer, I had one too, we sat outside not really talking. Then out come the arm stencils. Left arm's waves and water, carrying the koi theme up from my leg and out to the wrist. "Same river," he said. "Different altitude." Tattooists really do just say things like that sometimes.
Mood: Big milestone energy.
Sleeves in progress + I've become weird about long sleeves
Doing both arms at once, alternating each session. The inner bicep is genuinely heinous — I full-on yelped in session 44 and Hiro did his quiet little laugh, which is as close as he gets to taking the piss. The waves are unreal though, this moving-water texture you only get with tebori. Funny side effect: I've started wearing long sleeves everywhere. Not hiding it — I just want to control when people see the finished thing instead of getting 'ooh is that new?' at the supermarket.
Pain: 9/10 — inner bicep and the elbow ditch. Absolutely feral.
Healing: Arms heal quicker than the back but swell more. Ice packs nightly.
Mood: Weirdly protective of it now.
Arms done. Dreading the front.
Sleeves finished, wrist to shoulder, full coverage. Hiro spent a whole session just blending where the arms meet the back and you honestly can't tell where one ends. Now the front, and I'm nervous in a way I wasn't about any of the rest. The chest feels weirdly vulnerable. And the ribs are coming, which everyone and their dog has warned me about. Plan is cherry blossoms down the right, maple down the left, and a little fox hidden in the branches. Another secret.
Pain: Pre-emptive rib dread, mostly.
Mood: Nervous but committed.
The ribs. We need to talk about the ribs.
Right, the ribs. Session 73 I genuinely sat there thinking 'what if I just… leave this bit?' Who'd know? But the asymmetry would've haunted me forever so I breathed through it — long exhales, counting ceiling tiles, the works. Hiro won't do numbing cream, says it changes how the ink sits, so there's no hiding from it. Stomach was a lot kinder, more cushioning. But the lower belly near the hip bones? Nearly as bad as the ribs. Sleeping ten hours a night now, my body is wrecked just from healing.
Pain: 10/10 — the ribs are the worst pain I've felt, full stop. Nothing preps you.
Healing: Full two weeks between sessions now. Eating way more protein. Body needs the time.
Mood: Type-two fun. The kind you only enjoy afterwards.
Front's done — and it's nearly over (weird feeling)
Hikae panels framing my collarbones, blossoms cascading down one side, maple drifting down the other, fox tucked in a branch. From the front it reads almost like a vest — collarbone to hip, flowing straight into the sleeves. Hiro stepped back, looked at it for ages, and went "three more sessions, touch-ups only." And I felt… not just excited. A bit sad? This has been my Tuesday-night thing for four years. Don't totally know what I'll do with myself when it's finished.
Mood: Excited with a side of pre-emptive grief.
Done.
That's it. Last session was barely an hour, just touching up spots where ink dropped out in healing. Hiro photographed every angle, all very methodical, and then he bowed. In four and a half years he's never once bowed to me. I bowed back, neither of us said anything, and then I walked out into a Melbourne summer with zero bare skin below my neck. Got home, had a cold shower, stood in the bathroom mirror turning slowly like an idiot watching the water run over all of it. I'm not going to do the 'I'm a new person' speech. But I showed up 86 times, healed through all of it, and finished. That part I'm properly proud of.
Mood: Quietly chuffed.
“Everyone warned me about the ribs. Everyone was right. Would I do it again? Yeah, honestly, in a heartbeat.”
Looking back
People ask if I regret it and I never know what to say — it's like being asked if you regret the last four years of your life. The suit isn't something I have, it's something I did, eighty-six times over. Things I know now that I didn't at the start: the pain genuinely fades from memory (the ribs already feel theoretical), the money stings less than you'd think once it's spread over years, and the best bits weren't the big reveals — they were the quiet Tuesday sessions and the hidden bell nobody knows about. If you're on the fence: it's a lot. It's worth it. Just budget more and book more rest days than you think you need.
Summary
Total sessions
86
Total hours in chair
~430
Duration
4 years 7 months
Coverage
~92%
Technique
Tebori (hand-poke)
Most painful area
Ribs — 10/10
Longest session
6 hours (back)
Healing time (total)
~18 months cumulative
