A young woman is perched on the edge of a footstool, hands on knees; she looks up and smiles nervously at her friend. With hair scrunched up behind her head, her youthful appearance is all the more striking for her piercing blue eyes, so unusual with a Chinese face. A shaven-headed man sharing the footstool with her is playing around with an image of a winged dragon on a desktop computer. He turns to the woman and asks her opinion.

Waving away the cloud of smoke from the cigarette she has just lit, the woman says she likes it. The man prints a copy of the image as she hurriedly finishes her cigarette. When the image is printed, they make their way to one of the black-curtained booths in the shop.

The shop is Assassin Tattoos on Dongsi Beidajie, and the woman is 22-year-old Zeng Lu, a student at Beijing Broadcasting University.

It is her first tattoo, she says as artist Yu Minglei shaves her left ankle, before applying a deodorant stick to aid the adhesion of the image as he presses it against her skin. Zeng says she's not scared in the least, but her widened eyes, revealing the edges of her azure contact lenses, tell a different story.

Yu's preparation is meticulous, as surfaces are covered in gauze and new needles removed from their packets. As the final preparations are made, Zeng reveals she hasn't told her parents about her little body project, or mentioned it to her boyfriend, adding: "I don't care what he thinks."

As the wires are connected to the machine, the needles whine into life. Yu dips the apparatus into the small pot of black ink by his side and then, gripping Zeng's leg in his surgically gloved left hand, he applies the needle to the young girl's skin with his right. She bites her lower lip.