Building a Work of Art

To celebrate the release of the 2022 Indian Chief the legend-ary motorcycle company got together two of the world’s most sought after builders, Paul Cox and Keino Sasaki, to customize a bike for celebrated tattoo artist Nikko Hurtado.

- By Natalie Cuomo

Indian Motorcycle—the legendary brand that draws its lineage all the way back to the late 1800s—has recently come out with its most customizable bike ever. In order to celebrate the reimagined Indian Chief, the company reunited legendary builders Paul Cox and Keino Sasaki to custom build a bike for renowned tattoo artist Nikko Hurtado. We enlisted our resident bike expert Natalie Cuomo to moderate a conversation between the three heavy hitters. Over the course of an hour they discussed the 2022 Indian Chief, the similarities between tattooing and bike building, and much more.

Natalie Cuomo: Paul and Keino, you’re building this bike for Nikko. Can you give us a little background about how you came to work on this project?

Paul Cox: It was brought to both of us separately if we would be interested in working with Indian again, and then if we were interested in working with each other again, which both sounded like great ideas. We’ve been buddies for many years and it sounded like a lot of fun. This new 2022 Chief platform has been awesome to work with. The bike itself is such a departure from what they’ve been doing in recent years with the way it’s engineered and the way it’s built. We’re having a good time with it. We split up the project so that he [Keino] has his things he’s working on and I have my stuff that I’m working on, then we’ll just come together and make the whole thing come together.