Ben Lucas

Ben grew up in rural Illinois, drawing to keep himself out of his sister and cousins' way. By school he was the kid in the back of class with a pencil going. Skateboarding led him to graffiti, and from 1993 to 1997 his backpack carried art supplies and a piece book before it carried homework. In 1996, flipping through tattoo magazines at Tower Books, he saw a wild-style graffiti piece tattooed on a forearm, work only a graffiti artist could really pull off, and knew that was what he wanted to do for a living.

Every apprenticeship he applied for turned him down. His friends wanted tattoos from him anyway, so in 1997 he gave a friend his first one. In 2003 he started machining and welding at Butte College, and by 2004 was building his own custom coil tattoo machines from scratch, a process that pushed him to take the craft seriously. Working in a street shop from 2005 sharpened it further: machine tuning, flash painting, pigment mixing, everything past just drawing well.

Ben founded Eye of Jade in 2006 and opened its first location a year later, on the corner of 5th and Flume in downtown Chico, the only shop in town at the time that would take on cover-ups or tattoo in any style. Within a year he'd left his job at Sierra Nevada for it full time, and large-scale tattooing has been his focus ever since. Neo Traditional Japanese, Art Nouveau and Neo Traditional are what he returns to most, often folding in Fine Line, Photo Realism, Watercolor and Ornamental work to give a piece its own character.