Renowned tattoo artist Keith “Bang Bang” McCurdy doesn’t get to drive much. This makes him a typical Manhattan resident, but I find him in an atypical situation: at Miami Art Week, in a city where cars are ubiquitous to the culture, where he is announcing and celebrating his upcoming collaboration with Bentley.
Counterintuitively, Bang Bang’s lack of a quotidian vehicle may have cast him as the ideal collaborator.
When Bang Bang and his team inked the 2025 collaboration with Bentley, they sought to maintain the integrity of both brands while pushing the boundaries of creativity. “What am I allowed to do?” he asked. Exploring Bentley’s bespoke offering was answer enough. With its unmatched personalization experience, Bentley offers buyers more than 46 billion combinations of color, detail, and material. “People are designers and decorators inherently — from their hair to their style to their apartment,” Bang Bang said. In his view a car, like a tattoo, is a vehicle for expression.
“Maybe it’s a character flaw of mine, but I have to design things from scratch,” Bang Bang said. Ten years ago, his budding tattoo empire shifted the culture of a gritty, inaccessible scene: “When we started creating our brand and visual identity, we rethought the tattoo model — even the things people don't see. It's beautiful and it's very different. There are no images on the wall. It's white and minimal and very clean. Tattoo studios have adopted some of this, which is really flattering.”
Bang Bang’s tilt towards innovation extends to his latest experiment with “Magic Ink,” a technology that creates tattoos that appear or vanish with exposure to UV. A riff on Magic Ink appeared at Bentley’s Art in Motion showcase, where the upcoming partnership was announced. Guests, immersed in a multi-sensory experience of light installations, gathered around a wrapped Bentayga EWB co-designed by Bang Bang and Bentley. Then, the graphic black and white car transformed into something dynamic and unrestrained as ultraviolet lights revealed another layer of tattoos.
For 2025, Bang Bang’s partnership with Bentley aims to reinvent the luxury car with the same boundless vision he has brought to the world of tattoos. “[The car I’ll design] will have a surprise at every turn,” he tells me. The Bentley x Bang Bang partnership will offer clients a unique opportunity to incorporate their personal stories into a one-of-one car — a drivable expression of identity.
