Tattoo Artist Finds Fame And God While Inking In Chinatown

CHINATOWN, NY — Matt Buck gave his first "tattoo" at a Jewish summer camp in Connecticut when he was just 5 years old.

A friend asked him to draw a dragon on his back with a blue ballpoint pen. The young Buck — who also recalls being fascinated at age 3 by "big, scary, shirtless biker dudes" covered in tattoos — was happy to oblige.

"Ten minutes later, he's screaming and crying and pointing at me because he's getting in trouble with the counselors for getting a tattoo at a Jewish camp," said Buck, now a 28-year-old Upper East Side resident.

Buck has gone from summer-camp agitator to co-owner of his own Chinatown shop, No Idols Tattoo. His work landed him a chance to compete on the 10th season of Spike TV's reality show "Ink Master," which premiered Jan. 9.

The artists have to create an original piece each week in a series of challenges, each focusing on a different tattoo style. Contestants are eliminated each week and the winner gets $100,000 and a feature in Inked magazine.

But tattooing also took Buck on an unexpected religious journey. After years of doubting whether God existed, Buck joined a Messianic Jewish synagogue after some encounters with tattoos helped trigger a spiritual revelation, he said.

"Coming from such an antagonistic background towards God and faith, I know what it's like being on that side of the fence," Buck said at his shop on the Bowery. "So I think I'm here now to try to reach people who come from a similar background as me."

Buck grew up in Plainview, Long Island. His parents are Jewish but weren't particularly religions, he said — his mother once sent him to the Jewish summer camp with a ham and cheese sandwich despite the faith's prohibition on eating pork.

Buck studied illustration at Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida. Flipping through a friend's tattoo magazine his senior year of college, he discovered Last Rites Tattoo in Hell's Kitchen, where the artists specialized in the realist style that Buck was drawn to, he said.

He started hanging out there after graduating in 2011 and befriended the artists, who taught him the basics of tattooing, he said. Eventually he landed an apprenticeship at Soho's Sacred Tattoo in 2013, where he worked for three years before he and fellow artist Jon Mesa opened No Idols in 2016.

The pair chose Chinatown because the neighborhood was home to New York City's first-ever tattoo shop, Buck said. There are now five artists working in the second-floor space, where framed sketches line the walls and metal music accompanies the buzzing of tattoo needles.

"We've all got different styles, but the same appreciation for the quality we want to see at a shop," Buck said.

Buck long felt hostile toward religion and, until recently, much of his art included dark and "creepy" images, he said. But that changed after what he said was a profound experience he had on Sept. 1, 2016, just six months after No Idols opened.

On a walk with his dog, Meatball, that morning, Buck was thinking about how some biblical prophecies seemed to be coming true. He said he was struck by news stories about people having computer chips implanted in their hands, which reminded him of the "mark of the beast" described in the book of Revelation.

He was about to pass off his thoughts as coincidence when a woman walked by with a tattoo of a hamsa, a hand-shaped Jewish symbol. Buck's father had given him a hamsa necklace as a kid, he said. Then he learned someone had booked him to do his first-ever portrait of Jesus that following Sunday.

"I can either go, 'La la la la, I didn't hear any of that,' or I can humble myself and accept that the thing I hated most is the thing that's true," he said.

That prompted Buck to do historical research into Jesus, he said. Three months later, he joined Congregation Beth El of Manhattan, a conservative Messianic synagogue on the Upper East Side where congregants follow New Testament teachings and believe Jesus — or Yeshua, his Hebrew name — is the son of God.

After his spiritual revelation, Buck asked his rabbi whether he had to stop tattooing, as many consider a verse in the book of Levticus to prohibit the art. But he now believes the verse refers to an "idolatrous pagan ancestor worship, which is pretty far from contemporary tattooing for aesthetics," he said. He wore a yarmulke last week as he worked on a tattoo of a mermaid.

Buck said he's satisfied with how he did in the contest. He declined to say how far he got, but he won the first episode's challenge with a portrait of a bearded mermaid.

"It was a very intense creative atmosphere," he said. "Everyone was sitting around the big communal dinner table until the wee hours of the morning drawing and sketching and just motivated to make art like I hadn't since I was in art college."

Buck said he wants to do more biblically inspired tattoos. One of his favorite pieces is a portrait of Moses holding a sword.

"I feel like this is where I'm supposed to be for now," Buck said.

(Lead image: Matt Buck works on a leg tattoo last Tuesday at No Idols Tattoo, the Chinatown shop he co-owns. Photo by Noah Manskar)