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Justin Bieber's Tattoo Artist, Bang Bang McCurdy, Dishes On Singer's "Eye" Design, Being "Addicted" to Ink

Ink mastermind opens up about what the crooner's thinking was behind his latest tat

By Josh Grossberg, Lindsey Caldwell Jul 17, 2013 8:17 PMTags
Justin Bieber, Keith McCurdyInstagram

The guy who inked Justin Bieber certainly got an eyeful. And E! News has the lowdown.

Keith Bang Bang McCurdy, owner of Bang Bang Tattoos in New York's Lower East Side, spilled to us exclusively about the late-night tattoo session he did for the teen heartthrob and just what exactly Bieber was looking for design-wise that led him to choose a black-and-white image of an eye for the inside of his elbow on his left arm.

And it all started with an impromptu phone call.

"Justin called me around 10:30 pm last night and asked if I could open up the shop. We are both so busy, and our schedules are pretty hectic, so I opened up the shop, and he came in around 4:00 a.m.," McCurdy said.

The celebrated tattoo artist, who counts Rihanna, Katy Perry, Adele and Cara Delevingne among his celebrity clients, told E! News the "Boyfriend" singer came in with a few guy friends and was looking to add to his rapidly growing tat collection with "an eye that would represent his mother's."

"So I went in and pulled up a couple of options of high resolution photography, and Justin chose a female eye that best represented what he was looking for," McCurdy revealed. "I did the tattoo in black and white, because it complimented his other tattoos. I wanted it to compliment him, and not be a distraction from him."

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Bang Bang added that it's definitely not J.B.'s last tattoo.

"I'm not sure what his next tattoo will be, but we both joked about how we are addicted to tattoos," said the ink purveyor. "He joked, saying he's only 19, and he already has this many tattoos. The tattoo took about 30 minutes, and we left when the sun came up, which was pretty cool."

Bang Bang later tweeted, "'Eye' got that @justinbieber please believe ya!"

As for McCurdy, who earned his nickname from the tattoo he got on his neck at 18, this isn't his first design for the Biebs.

Bieber swung by his parlor last year for some ink and as part of a tradition he started with RiRi in which celebrities tattoo him after he's finished working on them, Bang Bang had Justin ink him with a picture of a "Swaggy Mouse."

This time, alas, Bieber declined to return the favor.