In The Chair With Nick Kang: The Tattoo Artist With No Straight Answers

By Lara Kramer  •  26 Aug 2026 in Features

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Nick from House of OMA in Bangsar has been tattooing for seven years now.

Though one of the more noticeable things about him, perhaps before you even get to the work, is that he carries those seven years of experience with a level of humility that feels increasingly rare in any creative field.

Especially one in which your name, your style and, quite literally, your signature can end up permanently attached to somebody else.

I was introduced to Nick as an “interesting character”, which is always a phrase that leaves quite a lot open to interpretation. It can mean somebody is well-travelled. It can mean they have a strange past.

It can mean they have stories you will either be fascinated or mildly concerned by. In Nick’s case, I formed my own opinion relatively quickly and described him, based on a first impression, as totally eccentric.

He would deny this, and that’s perhaps where things become even more interesting because the longer you spend talking to him, the more you realise that Nick seems almost entirely unaware of what a layered, unconventional, and genuinely singular person he is.

Not in the performative way some people cultivate an entire persona around being “weird” or difficult to understand, but in the much more authentic sense that he appears to have simply accumulated experiences, stories, interests, references, and strange little details over the course of living his life without ever stopping to think, actually, people might find this whole thing quite fascinating.

By the end of a conversation with the self-proclaimed “scab peddler”, you are left with the distinct impression that he could tell you something completely wild about his life, his travels or his past, follow it with an oddly specific fun fact, and then still maintain that he is “just a normal guy” who lives a normal life and finds a great deal of pleasure in doing his laundry.

Yes, the laundry thing is real. You heard it here first.

If you are the kind of person who cares about the persona of your tattoo artist, then Nick is the kind of person who rewards that particular curiosity.

He is articulate when speaking about his heritage, his music taste, and his journey as an artist, and there is a clear sense that his path into tattooing was not something he arrived at through a particularly conventional route.

Before becoming a tattoo artist, Nick majored in psychology and worked as a copywriter at large agencies, which, when you actually spend time with him, begins to make more sense than it initially sounds.

There’s something about the way he observes things, processes ideas, and speaks that feels almost forensic, although it is coupled with a natural deadpan quality and sense of humour that means you are never entirely sure whether a conversation is about to become deeply reflective or take an immediate and very specific detour.

Both happened during my tattoo session.

I got tattooed to Gojira while discussing Nick’s preference in meat, a subject on which he has very firm opinions.

Fish sits comfortably at the top of the list. Beef steak is, apparently, an absolute last choice. This may not be relevant to your next tattoo. But I think it is important information to have nonetheless.

Officially, Nick is known for Japanese-style work, traditional tattoos, and what can only be described as “weird stuff”.

When it comes to defining his style, however, he is hesitant to fixate on one particular label, which feels fitting considering how broad his work and interests are.

A friend once suggested he could coin his approach “psychedelic traditional”, and while I cannot speak on his behalf, I can say that it is a description that makes a great deal of sense when you look through the work.

There is something familiar in the foundations, whether it is traditional tattoo imagery or a recognisable approach to composition, but then there are touches of colour, humour, and visual choices that prevent it from feeling like a reproduction of something you have already seen a hundred times.

 

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He has also done album cover work, which may or may not influence your decision to get tattooed by him, but it earns him considerable brownie points in my book.

The thing I found particularly interesting about getting tattooed by Nick, though, was the process itself, especially because I did not arrive with a particularly straightforward brief.

I went to him with an open mind, several ideas, multiple possible placements, and the general energy of someone who had clearly spent too long considering all available options without committing to any of them. I probably confused him for a second there. Sorry.

But what I liked was that we did not immediately try to force the chaos into a decision. We worked through it by process of elimination, and Nick himself says that he has a difficult time explaining his creative process beyond sometimes needing to look into the distance and think for a bit, but what became clear to me during the session was that he is particularly good at helping you identify what you don’t want.

Which, honestly, can be much more useful.

There are people who know exactly what tattoo they want before they walk into a studio, down to the placement, reference image and millimetre-perfect details. There are also people who know the general feeling they want but have absolutely no idea how to translate that feeling into something visual, permanent and not immediately regrettable.

If you fall into the latter category, Nick feels like a particularly good person to sit down with because he does not seem interested in simply taking your first half-formed idea, executing it exactly as it was presented and sending you on your way.

And this is where, for me, the difference between different kinds of tattoo artists becomes most obvious.

There are artists who put their art onto your skin, and then there are artists who are capable of taking what you bring into the room, your personal style, your existing tattoos, your references, your indecision, the things you like, the things you absolutely do not like and perhaps even the things you cannot articulate properly, before filtering all of that through their own ability and experience to create something that feels specific to you without becoming a diluted version of their own work.

Nick feels like the latter.

For someone who is as layered and open as he is creatively, he is also one of the more versatile artists I have worked with because there seems to be a genuine interest in the person sitting in front of him rather than just the next available space on their body. Your own style and visual language matter. The tattoo has to work for you, not just for the portfolio.

That does not mean there is no Nick in the final result, because there very much is, but it feels less like an artist asking you to wear their work and more like an actual exchange between two people who are trying to arrive at the right answer together.

The same quality seems to run through his work as a whole. His portfolio somehow captured his sense of humour, his life experience, his references, and the fact that he is clearly comfortable moving between different forms of creative expression, while his technical ability gives him the freedom to follow those instincts without making the work feel directionless. Yes, even in his most ‘traditional’ pieces.

And yet, despite all of this, the overwhelming impression I got from him by the end of the session was that he genuinely does not seem to spend much time thinking about how talented he is. That is not the same as false modesty.

There is a particular type of creative person who knows exactly how good they are and then performs humility as another extension of their personal brand, constantly making sure everybody in the room knows that they are actually very humble about being exceptional. Nick does not feel like that.

He knows his sh*t, because you cannot do the work he does without knowing your sh*t.

And he is not afraid to admit that he has experience, opinions, and a particular understanding of his craft. He simply appears to be the last person who would use any of it to make you feel like he needs to be impressed by himself.

The local tattoo scene is full of seriously talented people, and I have been fortunate enough to meet artists who are kind, generous with their time, and genuinely lovely to talk to, but it is still rare to find someone who manages to be both deeply knowledgeable and completely down to earth without either quality feeling manufactured.

You take someone with seven years of tattooing experience, an extensive and versatile portfolio, guest spots and travel behind him, a crazy sense of colour, a natural deadpan-ness and enough life stories to make you question what exactly constitutes “normal”, with a completely mundane observation about life or an oddly passionate opinion that reminds you that, beneath the stories and the skill set, he really is such a person.

I have written before about tattoo sessions that feel less like appointments and more like catching up with a friend, and I stand by that.

But getting tattooed by Nick feels a little more like sitting in the back row of a classroom with that one friend your parents initially warn you against getting too close to, before eventually discovering that they are actually one of the most unfiltered, genuine, and consistently entertaining people you know.

And yet I can almost guarantee that if you pointed any of this out to him, he would probably shrug and tell you he just likes the smell of detergent liquid.

I suppose that is the thing about Nick: you can spend hours talking to him and discovering his work, and still leave feeling like you have only scratched the surface. Which probably gives you good enough reason to sit in his chair again and again.

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