This Beautiful Machine

His name is Nathan Kostechko. You pronounce it like “co-STECK-oh.” It means “bone” in Polish, cosmically fitting for a man obsessed with drawing skulls. Friends just call him Nate. He surfs and skates, tattoos and paints—lots of skulls in many styles: classical, airbrushed, paint-splattered realism. He’s the man who inked Chippa Wilson’s full back piece of a skeleton on horseback, wielding a giant scythe above its head. Everywhere you look in the surf and skate industries, you can find his art: his unmistakable reapers etched across flesh, merch, and boardcraft alike. But, as he will tell me, “surf and skate don’t pay shit.” Tattooing’s where the money’s at; painting’s where Kostechko locates the soul. What is it with us surfers and skaters and our fixation with skulls anyway? It must have something to do with how the ride brings us all just a little bit closer to death.

Last year, Nate was driving home from another late night of carving into people’s skin, with his good pup Trip riding shotgun, trustily panting, when the washed-out hues of the night highway turned to “just redness.”

A moment earlier, he’d looked up to see brake lights—another car stopped just ahead. He was going full speed on a narrow overpass. Nowhere to swerve.

Suddenly, stillness. Silence except the engine’s hiss. Kostechko opened the door, stepped out, and fell to the pavement. His body was all wrong.

Trip trotted up and gave his owner a curious look. The dog seemed oddly calm. Then Trip bolted—just disappeared into the shadowy geometry of the LA night.

“Are you okay, man?” a guy was asking Kostechko.

“What are you saying?” Kostechko asked back. Then he screamed: “GO GET MY DOG!”

•

More formally: Nathan Kostechko, 41, is an LA-based, globally exhibited tattooer and fine art painter whose work has emerged from the surf and skate core of his hometown, San Clemente. 

He’s the proprietor of Nathan’s Lounge Tattoo Shop, established in 2017, a high-end joint tucked beneath an overpass in LA’s Echo Park, where, beyond the lords of surf and skate, he’s inked up LA’s A-list. He did Adam Levine’s left leg sleeve, a torrent of Japanese-style waves swirling in stripes of black and white, as though trying to drown the pop rocker. But Kostechko won’t tell you that.

“We’re from a generation where if you weren’t humble, you got your hands broke,” Kostechko’s tattooing friend Tim Hendricks, a surfer and longtime LA-based artist who owns Fullerton’s Classic Tattoo, tells me. “And the other thing about our generation is that most of those guys were craftsmen first and artists second. Nathan is an artist first, and he’s also an incredible craftsman. His work combines those. You can see it in his choice of needle size, the way he peppers in his shading so it’s in perfect accordance to the size and dimension and maximizes the readability of the tattoo. Also, I mean, how can you not point out one of Nathan’s grim reapers? You know it from a mile away.”

Kostechko’s primary style is unmistakable but hard to pin down. It’s a kind of realism that threads a needle between detail and abstraction, impeccable shading mixed with clear, legible lines and sharp contrasts between black and gray. And, of course, the skull, that iconic symbol of skate culture, Kostechko’s first love. See how even today, as he describes his injury from the crash, he does so by analogy to skateboarding: “Your pelvis has a ridge that holds your femur in, kind of like coping on a ramp, and that was all chipped out. The top of my femur was shattered to bits.”

It was a lucky result, by Kostechko’s account. We’re sitting together outside a trendy breakfast spot—white paint, pink neon—just up the road from Huntington Beach. The sun is coming out. The sweet banana toast on his plate is untouched. He’s too busy showing me a photo on his phone of what the crash did to his car—if the word “car” can still describe whatever this thing is. It looks like an abstract sculpture, all twisted metal.

“My buddy’s friend is a paramedic,” Kostechko tells me between sips of coffee. “He goes, ‘I’m gonna show you a vehicle, and I want you to tell me what happened to this person.’ And the paramedic goes, ‘That person’s dead.’”

Against these fourth-hand anecdotal odds, our brunch conversation is not a hallucination. Kostechko is very much alive today. And, by the grace of whatever you pray to, so, too, was everyone in the other car. “One person broke an arm,” Kostechko says, and elaborates with a “the universe works in strange ways” shrug.

Just eight months after his accident, Kostechko is even back in the water, surfing again. Our hair is still wet from a morning session beneath the oil derricks and emaciated palms.

“They were X-raying my lungs to see if they were punctured,” Kostechko continues, sitting carefully in his chair, “and the guy was like, ‘Whoa!’ and I’m like [in an anxious voice], ‘What?’ and he’s like, ‘Usually they take up one frame. Your lungs take up two. They’re huge! Are you a swimmer?’ And I’m like, ‘I surf.’”

Kostechko surfs well. During our session, he deftly navigated HB’s tricky, section-y, cross-shore sidewinders—pumping, then pumping, then slashing at a choice section. His performance is more impressive when you consider the slight limp he still carries in the parking lot.

He describes the sensation of his leg in the second person, as though inviting me to inhabit his pain: “Your hip flexor hurts like hell. Your hip feels weird, and then from here to there”—he identifies pretty much the entire length of his thigh—“is numb. It feels like if you were to get frozen and you’re thawing out.”

For all of the discomfort he must be in, and for all the shit luck of his accident, and for the greater pains of his whole life, Kostechko seems to float on the effortless cool of those whom fate has tapped. He wears his thick, straight hair slicked back. When he smiles, which he does often, two gold teeth flash behind his canines—one for each decade of blasting tattoos. His frame is elegantly skeletal (he’s 6’4″), crisply dressed in all black: jacket, jeans, and boots. Ink crawls out from every hem, up the backs of his hands and onto his fingers, on an earlobe and up his neck—creatures and plants and biomech parts all tangled in a hybrid scribble of styles.

His skin has been coated not once but many times, so that elements of old, fading tattoos backdrop newer designs. These “blastovers” give the effect of a sketch pad that has been endlessly erased and redrawn in, forming layers like rings of a tree, incarnating time.

“The only space I have left is half a kneecap, my armpits, my face…” He pauses. “And my ding-dong,” he adds with a gold-flecked grin.

While Kostechko was recovering from emergency surgery to repair his hip, the doctor told him he was going to administer fentanyl to mask the pain. “Don’t,” Kostechko said. “I’ve been sober for 10 years. I don’t want to know what it’s like.”

That’s how Kostechko got Trip, his sobriety dog, when he was 30, after a decade of too many mornings waking up and “hating yourself and your life.”

“Trip went everywhere with me,” he says. “Every day. Came to the studio. Look, there he was.”

Kostechko pulls up a picture of Trip, who looks like an extremely good boy.

“What breed was he?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Kostechko says, as though he’d never considered it before, “but he was the fuckin’ shit. Best fucking dog in the world.”

Trip has never been found.

Apparently, when you’re sober and in need of painkillers, what the doctors do is put you in a k-hole. That’s ketamine, for the uninitiated. Specifically, a dose so powerful that, as a friend once described the come-up, it feels like you’re strapped to a rotating gurney that’s trying to flip you upside down—a disturbance you naturally resist, but the harder you fight it, the more forcefully the gurney pushes, until finally you’re left with no choice but to submit. So you give in and flip upside down, and you see beneath the floorboards of reality, on the other side of perception’s door, into a harrowing, white-knuckle inverse dimension where the Mystery laughs in your face.

“So I agree to the ketamine,” Kostechko explains, “and the guy’s like, ‘Okay, we gotta do this now. One hundred milligrams! This dude’s huge!’ And he looks at me and goes, ‘Just imagine you’re on the best wave of your life,’ and he loads me up and I just fuckin’ got sent off.”

“What was it like?” I ask.

“It was beautiful,” he answers. “I went to another place, an island-like paradise. Everything was hues of yellow and moving in a segmented, machine-like rhythm. Then I met a God-like entity. I don’t even know what it was—just energy. And it was like, ‘You’re dying.’ And I was like, ‘Fucking seriously?’ And it was like, ‘Yup. If you don’t die, you’re gonna be a vegetable. I know it sucks, but you gotta die, dude.’ So I just leaned into it, and it was blissful.

“And then, all of a sudden, I’m in a hospital bed, and it’s super dismal. Everyone is mutant, deformed. And I’d be like, ‘Hey!’ They’re like, ‘Hey!’ And I’d be like, ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Ed.’ I’m like, ‘What’s up, Ned?’ He’s like, ‘Ed!’ Then he’d ask, ‘How are you, Nate?’ And I’d be like, ‘I’m good to go!’

“And then it would start over. I kept going through the conversation cycle that would end with me saying, ‘I’m good to go!’ and then it would start over again. I was getting pretty frustrated, but there were also moments in the trip where it was so overpowering—it was beauty, and then it was like, ‘Oh my God, is this eternity? This nonstop traveling through this beautiful fucking machine? I don’t know if I can do this. I’m not ready.’ And then I’d go back to the hospital bed. 

Finally, I realized I had to keep myself from saying ‘I’m good to go’ to break the cycle. So I go, ‘Hey, Ed!’ He’s like, ‘Ah, you remember my name!’ I’m like, ‘Yeah!’ He’s like, ‘You know the number?’ So I told him the number, and then I hear him on the phone, and I get handed the phone and I’m like, ‘Dad?’ and he goes, ‘Nate?’ And I just snap out of it.”

To listen to Kostechko tell stories is to begin to understand his mind and, by extension, his art. 

His memories are rendered in imagery—colors, textures, patterns. Death and the macabre haunt the terrain, often symbolized by the grim reaper, but not without the relief of the sublime and the absurd. Above all, there prevails a concern with archetypal themes, the mystic and the existential, the things of this world we can’t comprehend.

As it happens, Kostechko’s accident seems to have closed some long karmic loop that brought him back to his parents’ doorstep. “You move out when you’re 18, and you never think you’re going to get to live with your parents again,” Kostechko muses. “My parents and I have been through quite the journey. There’s been a lot of hurt.”

“What was it like living with them again?”

He told me he had to relearn how to dangle his legs off the edge of the bed, use a walker, even take a shit: “The first one took three days! When you rattle your fucking hips, to push out a turd is impossible.”

Within the greater arc of his homecoming, Kostechko found smaller echoes: “You finally fall asleep, and then you wake up, go to stretch, and my leg would shake, and then you relive everything. It was like [the Adam Sandler movie] 50 First Dates: ‘Oh, fuck—I broke my leg. Oh, fuck—I lost my dog. Hey, Mom, can you hand me the piss jug?’ Your mom’s helping you shower. She’s like, ‘I won’t look!’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t care. I just don’t want to fall.’”

“How did you pass the rest of those days?”

“Honestly? I’ve been tattooing so much for the past 10 years since getting sober, really grinding and going for it. I wanted to buy this house and do all these things to keep up with the beast, you know? (Kostechko has earned his way up to making $300 an hour tattooing, which has afforded him an honest pad in San Pedro that he painted all black.) 

So it was, like, this weird chance to just finally stop. I didn’t look at my phone, read, watch TV. I’d wake up and literally just sit there. Have a coffee. Talk to my mom and dad a little bit. Maybe scoot out to the porch and sit in the sun for a while. I had a sketchbook that I was drawing in. I’d try to do a drawing a day. But sometimes I couldn’t. Some days, I just rocked. It hurt.”

Throughout the monthslong process of his recovery, Kostechko produced a series of pastels as a way of processing the cataclysm. They’re drawn in bright, tessellating strokes—tiger heads, swallows, and reapers rendered with a sense of vibration, like film frames exposed to the ketamine’s afterglow. Each image is touched with psychedelic flecks of bright primary colors not typical for the subject matter—blue on a tiger, red on a wave—captioned in a loose hand with some phrase that stuck to Kostechko’s brain at the time, resonated as significant. A perfect almond barrel: “Prescribed k-hole.” A horse head: “It could take awhile.” A lone skull: “The kingdom of heaven is within.”

In those quiet, humbling moments, pissing in a jug, being bathed by his mother again, sitting in the silence of his parents’ home, Kostechko says he made contact, after years of doing battle with what he calls “the beast, the machine,” with that longed-for inner sanctuary: “It was really good for me.”

•

Kostechko learned to draw his first skull from Ms. Reich, his seventh-grade art teacher who handpicked him as one of 10 students for her selective “Murals” class.

“It was the first time you kind of got the tap on the shoulder, the seal of approval,” he says, “like, ‘Hey, you can do something with this.’”

It was the encouragement Kostechko, as the youngest of three boys and the family’s black-sheep skate rat, badly needed. “I wasn’t really good in school academically,” he explains.

“I was in separate classes to learn how to read and write. I definitely had problems with that. They didn’t know where to put me.”

This early-life alienation was amplified by a string of “weird ailments” that cultivated within a young Kostechko a powerful identification with the plight of the leper. (Indeed, his favorite tattoo artist, the legendary SF-based Grime, who did a huge piece on Kostechko’s leg, was horribly burned as a child, leaving his face disfigured with scars.)

“I had an infection on my head,” Kostechko recalls of his own afflictions. “It was this big fungus-pad-growth mushroom thing, and it spiraled out, so my skin was all flaky and shit. It was super contagious, so I had to be quarantined in my room for months. 

I still have a bald spot and indentations on my head from the scars it left behind.”

One day, coming home from a doctor’s checkup, Kostechko’s parents surprised him with a drafting table and a full set of art supplies. “I just sat there in my room and drew,” he remembers.

San Clemente culture provided ample material for a kid obsessed with drawing: “Skate art, waves…I’d draw punk rockers and pot leaves, and re-create logos. That’s all from the San C influence.”

When Kostechko flunked out of high school and landed in continuation school, Ms. Reich’s “Murals” class came in handy.

“I was doing so bad,” he says, “the teacher said if I paint the entire classroom, she’ll pass me.”

The class was history. Kostechko covered the walls with American iconography—Lady Liberty, Old Glory. Art became his currency in the world.

Kostechko traces his ability to trade on this currency even further back, to an eccentric uncle, his father’s youngest brother, openly gay, whom Kostechko describes as a kind of rootless boho artist scavenging his keep at society’s fringe.

“He looks exactly like me but with long gray hair and a beard. He would come and stay with us sometimes,” Kostechko recounts. “We had a box of crayons and a pile of paper, and he sat me down and goes, ‘Grab every color a monkey isn’t.’ So I’m grabbing green, purple, blue, and he takes them all and he just starts scratching this drawing, and he draws this crazy fucking monkey. And he goes, ‘Things aren’t what they seem. You can make it whatever you want.’”

What easier way to see things anew than through the brain drip of psychedelics? When, at around 14, Kostechko started taking hallucinogens, he found a second interest in common with his uncle. “I was so grateful to have someone I could talk about those experiences with. I told him I saw a grid, the layers within the layers of reality. I was falling through them,” Kostechko remembers, “and he goes, ‘Those are called the bardos.’”

At 18, Kostechko applied his visions to tattooing for the first time, where he found further intersections with subjects of his captivation: “It was similar to surfing or skateboarding, where you did what you wanted, you looked how you wanted, you weren’t really a part of society. I wanted that, but I couldn’t make it as a surfer or a skater. And I got tattooed and realized, ‘Oh, shit—this is just like skating, just like surfing.’”

“Did you ever have any fear of closing off other avenues?” 

I asked. “Like, never having a safe, conventional job?”

“It’s interesting you say that,” Kostechko said. “I was originally going to school [at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising] to become a shoe designer. At the time, I didn’t like my tattoos, and I was working at a pretty bottom-of-the-barrel street shop around a bunch of middle-aged guys who weren’t doing much with their lives. No offense to them, but that’s what it was. And then I went to a tattoo convention and met a bunch of people who were doing really cool work and taking it really seriously, and that changed things for me.”

“How would you describe the style of your tattoos?”

“You know the old refrigerator you grew up with that your dad sticks in the garage, covered with stickers and stuff? That’s how I look.”

Experience has taught Kostechko where to draw the definitive line: “No offense to people who have face tattoos, but people might not look you in the eyes anymore. A friend once said of someone with face tattoos, ‘That’s a long life.’ And statistically, back in the day, most people who have face tattoos committed suicide.”

“There is this historical connection between tattooing and trauma, or personal demons,” I pointed out. “How do you see that relating to your own story?”

“I’ve definitely utilized tattooing to deal with things that have happened in my life. Getting my neck tattooed so young was a way of rebelling against my family.”

“What about them were you rebelling against?”

Kostechko’s work seems to tap some figurative portal to the levels of raw existence that, in our day-to-day fuzz, we typically ignore.

He pauses for a moment, as if wondering how much he should share.

“Okay, so my dad was a medical salesman, and my mom was a schoolteacher—the kind of teacher who all the parents wanted their kids to be in her class. We were the picture-perfect family. Then, when I was about 18, my mom somehow got into drugs. Somehow, she got addicted to meth. She lost her job and disappeared. Just disappeared. My dad was extremely depressed for a very long time. Tattooing is what allowed me to escape that.”

Yes: Implausibly, the Kostechko family story ends in happy reunion. “My mom would turn up every few years,” he continues. “After 12 years, she came back for good, beat her addiction, and my dad took her back. They’re in Mexico right now, celebrating my mom’s birthday.”

•

Odd recurrences. Layers and loops in time and space. The bardos. I’m not generally a superstitious person, but Kostechko’s work seems to tap some figurative portal to the levels of raw existence that, in our day-to-day fuzz, we typically ignore. His art is a kind of mainline to the basic fact of death—not to dwell or brood, but to transcend.

Memento mori, the old Latin dictum classically symbolized by the skull, literally translates to “Remember that you must die.” On the surface, it seems like a bummer. But something paradoxical happens when we embrace the fact of our inevitable extinguishment.

“Say you have depression, or substance abuse,” Kostechko offers, “and you’re obsessed with killing yourself—but when you actually almost die, it makes you feel lucky to be alive.”

He is using his latest reminder to slow down. To tattoo a bit less and paint a bit more, and truly practice being alive by focusing on the layers within the layers of his work.

When I ask Kostechko what he’s searching for in his paintings now, he summons the analogy of cracks in skin: The closer you zoom in, the more cracks appear. They’re infinite. Kostechko is searching for the deepest layer he can find without breaking the whole.

“People think life is the most amazing thing, but what happens after is the real journey,” he says, musing again on his favorite duality. “Our experience here is a contribution to the collective consciousness. We collect information that is sent back to the central hub, to teach it about all of this.”

To teach it, perhaps, about what it means to move through this beautiful fucking machine: to be, to suffer, to ride, to create. To Trip. To die.