In Berlin, romper stomper copper Detective Minks (Christian Redl) is on the trail of a slasher who has made a habit of slicing off huge swathes of his victims' skin. Minks is convinced that the killer's preying on the local tattooing community so he blackmails club-loving rookie Schrader (August Diehl) into helping him infiltrate the world of body modification, piercings and tattoos in exchange for keeping schtum about the youngster's dodgy drug record. Uncovering a literal "skin trade" in which collectors pay for fancy tattoos to be removed from the skin of willing (or sometimes unwilling donors), Minks and Schrader find themselves sucked into a disturbingly amoral world in which art is never more than skin deep, and collectors will stop at nothing to get the works they're after