A successful doctor, content with life, develops a strange illness - anaphylaxis, a severe allergy to human skin. He tries to defy his illness, but his life is turned upside down by his inability to touch people. He can't function professionally, socially or intimately with his fiancée, whom he eventually loses. Then he discovers that dead bodies don't trigger his illness. He withdraws from life around him to work as a pathologist, dealing only with dead bodies. Life is calm until he encounters a woman's dead body covered from neck to toe with writing. Intrigued, he starts to read. She was a poet. Imprisoned as a wife and mother, she suffered postnatal depression. Writing was her solace, but she sought escape so much it became a dangerous obsessive compulsive disorder. They locked her in a psychiatric hospital to recover. When released, she was told not to touch a pen again. But she did - to end it all by writing her story on her skin, dying as a result. Reading her story, the doctor discovers a profound bond between his experiences of solitude and those recounted in her tattooed words. The dead poet becomes the doctor's only chance for a human connection as he reaches to her across the boundaries of death.