Archive Note
Jimmy Ho, surname 何, was reportedly born in 1944 and grew up inside the family trade at his father James Ho's Rose Tattoo in Tsim Sha Tsui. Sources say he began tattooing as a boy, around age ten to twelve, before going professional around 1958 when, at about fourteen, his father gave him two machines and he opened his own shop, reportedly on Ashley Road in Tsim Sha Tsui (that address is single-source). Over a career of more than six decades he moved north, and by his later years his shop was International Tattoo (國際紋身) on Portland Street in Mong Kok. He specialized in dragons rendered in the four-claw convention, which in the Chinese imperial schema denoted high-ranking nobility rather than the five-claw emperor's dragon, working in the East-meets-West "Hong Kong style" that fused American Traditional sailor flash with Chinese and Japanese subject matter. He is credited with helping move Hong Kong tattooing from a clandestine, triad-associated trade toward a respected art form; his obituary called him "a pillar of the local tattoo scene." His clientele reportedly included film stars and triad figures, though the named associations, among them the actor Andy Lau, are single-source, and the Andy Lau item is described as body art painted for a film rather than a permanent tattoo. Horiyoshi III, the Yokohama irezumi dean, is reported to have visited Ho's Hong Kong shop a number of times in the 1990s, an exchange through which Ho absorbed Japanese concepts into his work; the contact is well supported while the frequency is soft. Around 2019 he stepped back and his protege Justin Ng took over the shop, now branded Jimmy & Justin Tattoo. Ho died in March 2026 at the age of 82, per the Time Out Hong Kong obituary of 17 March 2026; the exact date and the cause of death are not publicly reported and should not be inferred. A frequently repeated claim that Ho tattooed thirty to forty servicemen a day during the Korean War is a chronological error: born in 1944, he was a child during that war (1950 to 1953), and that volume belongs to his father's Rose Tattoo, while Ho's own servicemen work fits the 1960s Vietnam-era trade. His lineage and style are corroborated in the O.cult and Zolima City Mag features.