Archive Note
Born in Sydney to the Christchurch tattooist Mark "Fats" Jordan, who died of bowel cancer when Matt was a young child, Jordan learned to draw in his father's studio during weekend visits and carries a tribute to him in his own work. In 2013 he opened Ship Shape Tattoo in the Dairy Flat area of Auckland, co-owned with Ben Kaye and Jason Baker, which grew into a roughly ten-artist studio widely described as a hub of realistic tattooing in New Zealand, and around the end of 2019 he opened Studio Takitimu in the Bay of Islands, dividing his time between the two. He specializes in black-and-grey realism, including portraits and mythological subjects, won first prize in black-and-grey at the Gods of Ink convention in Frankfurt in 2023 and 2024, and in 2024 mounted an exhibition pairing live models displaying his tattoos with large-scale photographs.
Lineage
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