Kyle Kuzma participated in a GQ video where he talked through many of his tattoo designs. The video opens with him saying, "Growing up, I used to love watching Allen Iverson play basketball, and you know, he always had tattoos. I feel like all my favorite basketball players had tattoos: Birdman, he had everything. His artwork is crazy."
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In December of 2019, artist Herchell Carrasco shared an image of himself tattooing text on the hand of Kuzma. In February of 2020, Carrasco posted a photo of the finished work to his twitter account—the words "Face the world"; "compassion"; "Be You." and "Relentless" in typewriter font.
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Kuzma has spent enough times in tattoo shops that he was able to try tattooing himself. As seen in the above photo, he's tattooing the hand of artist Herchell Carrasco, who's done many of Kuzma's designs.
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Kuzma added a tattoo in September 2018, a reference to Space Jam on his right leg. The image, posted to twitter by the tattoo artist Herchell Carrasco of Pachuco Tattoo of Orange County shows a pretty faithful re-creation of Michael’s Secret Stuff from the film:
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In July 2018, artist Herchell Carrasco posted a video highlighting some of the tattoos he's done for Kuzma. Among the designs is a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil tattoo on his right calf, as seen above.
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Kuzma came into the league in 2017 with a tattoo on his right arm filled with references to his upbringing in Flint, Michigan including a road sign for I-75 (which runs through the west side of Flint), the Ford logo (Flint’s nickname is “Vehicle City” because of its long history of Ford manufacturing), and an M for the state of Michigan.
A 2017 interview with Marc J. Spears gave Kuzma a chance to talk about his hometown and included the following exchange:
How are you taking the water situation in your hometown of Flint? (Some residents were exposed to high levels of lead in the drinking water because of poor water treatment.)
For my family, it affected them at first. Once I got drafted I was able to move them away from the city into the suburbs. At first they were definitely affected. There was a lot of lead in the water, and if you lived in the city it affected all things in life. You got to take showers in the water. You had to brush your teeth with bottled water. If you want to cook, you have to use bottled water. It is sad because we go out of our way to help so many Third World countries, but we got a dying city that is kind of helpless.
Is there anything you can do to help the situation?
The biggest thing I can do is to spread awareness and just help our community in the offseason in any kind of way when I’m there. Eventually, as my career goes on, I feel I can do a lot more.
When it started, a lot of the water was brown. A lot of water in Flint is cloudy anyway. It’s pretty tragic that the government kind let it go about and let it kill people within the city, especially a city that is predominantly black. It’s kind of a genocide.
To learn more about the Flint water crisis and support efforts to change things there, visit Water You Fighting For.
