There are artists who arrive like fireworks. They announce themselves early and loudly, with a style that dares you to look away. Then there are artists who do not arrive at all, at least not theatrically. They simply keep working. They keep showing up. They keep refining. One day, without warning, you realise the room has been listening to them the whole time.
Chris Mata’afa belongs to the second category. In a world that often rewards noise, his work has the confidence to be calm. And yet the name he is known by, “Showstoppr,” is not a contradiction. It is simply misunderstood. The show he stops is not the obvious one. It is the private show of distraction, the endless scroll, the half glance that becomes a longer look. His tattoos do not demand attention. They hold it.
When one of his portraits appears, people do a particular thing without noticing they are doing it. They pause. They lean in. They look longer than they planned. The tattoo does not shout technique or novelty. It sits on the skin like it was always meant to be there, a presence that feels less like ink and more like memory made visible.
There is a stillness to the way Mata’afa tattoos. Not the absence of energy, but a controlled quiet. The kind you feel in a room just before an orchestra begins, or on a street after rain when the noise has been rinsed away. In an industry that often rewards spectacle, he has built his reputation on presence. Presence is hard to describe but easy to recognise. It is what makes a portrait feel as if it might look back.
Recently, that presence earned him a place among the Global Top 100 Tattoo Artists recognised by SKINGRAPHICA. Lists are imperfect vessels for art. They compress years into a line of text, discipline into a badge. But sometimes a list does one honest thing. It confirms what the best eyes already know. It says, plainly, this person belongs here.
A quiet interval where the pace slows and the standard stays.
The portrait that refuses to perform
In one of Mata’afa’s surrealistic portraits, an elderly man’s face appears with a contemplative gravity, and inside that gravity another image burns. A church, engulfed in flames, lives within the silhouette like a memory refusing to be extinguished. It is the kind of concept that, in less careful hands, might turn into theatrics. Mata’afa does something more difficult. He lets it breathe. The fire glows without screaming. The smoke moves without insisting. The portrait remains a portrait, human first, story second, technique last.
Scale and atmosphere that stay calm, even when the image is intense.
This is what his work does at its best. It holds two ideas at once. The image is cinematic, but the tattoo is not trying to impress you with cinema. It is trying to feel true. You sense the restraint behind it, the decisions to do less where more would have been easier. Realism, at its highest level, is not an act of copying. It is an act of translation. The artist is translating light, texture, and the small emotional physics of a face into something permanent. Mata’afa’s translation is fluent.
People describe his tattoos as alive, but not in the cheap way that means bright highlights and high contrast. Alive, in his case, means the image seems to possess its own atmosphere. The water looks as if it could ripple. The shadow looks as if it could move when you shift your weight. The skin looks as if it holds the warmth of the day. When you are close enough to see the fine work, the tattoo does not unravel into a collection of tricks. It becomes more convincing. It becomes, strangely, calmer.
He does not make portraits that perform for an audience. He makes portraits that exist.
That matters. Tattoos live on people. They travel through days, through seasons, through the quiet years no one photographs. A portrait that performs is exhausting. A portrait that exists can belong to someone. You can live with it. You can grow older with it. You can look at it in the mirror on a tired morning and still recognise yourself in the choice you made.
Work ethic as an origin story
Ask Mata’afa where his style comes from and you do not get a neat myth. He does not sell you an origin tale with a single lightning strike. He points instead to something less romantic and more reliable.
“My style originates from my work ethic,” he says.
It is the sort of line that could sound like a slogan if it were not delivered with the weight of someone who has earned the right to say it. He talks about being the hardest worker in the room, about details that other people would not normally do, about separating himself not through branding but through finish. When he says it, you can picture the hours. You can picture the late nights when the design is almost done but not done enough, when the temptation is to call it finished and he chooses not to.
In tattooing, you can feel that choice. You can see it in the corners where most people stop caring, the small transitions where the surface becomes believable. The difference between a good tattoo and a great one often lives in those transitions. It lives in the decision to resolve the last ten percent, even when the last ten percent costs the most time.
Mata’afa’s pieces feel finished because they are finished. Not just completed, but resolved. The image looks settled, like a thought that has come to rest. And the more you look, the more you realise that rest is not accidental. It is work. It is control. It is a refusal to leave the tattoo half answered.
South Auckland, and the discipline of staying grounded
He came up in South Auckland, New Zealand, a place he describes affectionately as rough around the edges. The phrase has a familiar ring, but in his mouth it does not sound like a complaint. It sounds like an explanation. A certain kind of upbringing gives you a particular calibration. It keeps you humble, not in the performative way humility is sometimes worn, but in the practical way of understanding what matters.
He is a proud Samoan Kiwi. He carries that identity with the seriousness of someone who understands it as inheritance, not aesthetic. He wears the traditional Samoan pe’a, a hand tapped half body tattoo that is both art and ordeal, a rite of passage not undertaken casually.
“It represents my culture, my family, and my honor,” he says.
You can hear, in that sentence, the distance between tattooing as fashion and tattooing as life. In many parts of the modern world, tattoos are choices, sometimes impulsive, sometimes curated. In the lineage Mata’afa belongs to, tattooing can also be a responsibility. A marker. A statement of belonging. Something you do not just wear but carry.
There is humour in him too, an ease that prevents reverence from becoming stiffness. He jokes that people like him do not usually end up featured in magazines unless holding a rugby ball or posing topless. It is a laugh line, but it also tells you something about his perspective. He sees the world clearly. He knows what the stereotypes are. He knows what people expect. And he knows how quietly powerful it is to exceed those expectations without needing to announce it.
That groundedness follows him into the studio. It is there in the way he talks, in the way he makes space for other people’s comfort. It is there in the way he leads. A person can come from a place that teaches toughness and still choose kindness. The toughness becomes discipline. The kindness becomes atmosphere.
Mata’afa sits unguarded and unperformed, where discipline, patience, and quiet intent matter more than spectacle.
Auckland living room to Melbourne, the long middle
His tattooing began in 2009, not in a sleek studio with a clean origin story, but in a living room in Auckland. That detail matters. Living room tattooing has a particular sound, the hum of a machine in a domestic space, the improvisation, the early hunger. It is the kind of beginning that produces either chaos or focus. He chose focus.
By 2010, he had moved into a studio environment, learning the machinery of the industry beyond his self taught start. And then, in 2013, shortly after getting married, he and his wife Teejay moved to Australia. It is easy to speak about relocation as if it were a plot point. In reality, moving countries is a thousand small decisions. It is risk and paperwork and hope. It is the kind of leap that tests whether ambition is real.
In Melbourne, he built a life, then a reputation, then a standard. Over the years, his work began to win at conventions. The awards came, then the invitations, then the evolution from competitor to judge. At a certain point, people stop asking if you are good and start asking what you think is good. That is a different kind of recognition. It is a sign you have become part of the architecture of the craft.
He also kept his sense of humour. The nickname “Showstoppr” floats around him with an almost ironic tenderness, because his presence is not brash. The stopping happens in the work itself. In the moment someone realises they have been staring longer than they meant to. In the way a tattoo can hold a room without raising its voice.
Portraits without panic
There is a particular kind of pressure that comes with portraits. You are not just tattooing an image. You are tattooing someone’s mother, someone’s child, someone’s hero, someone’s grief. The likeness matters, but so does the feeling behind it. Portrait tattoos carry emotional weight even when the client does not speak it aloud. The skin becomes a memorial, a tribute, a private message to the world.
Mata’afa does not approach that weight with theatrics. He approaches it with an almost disarming calm.
“Portraits I don’t think too much about; I just do them,” he says. “If I start thinking too much, I overthink the process and complicate things. So I treat portraits like any other tattoo.”
In another artist, that could sound careless. In him, it sounds like an antidote to panic. He is not saying portraits do not matter. He is saying the best way to honour them is to stay clear. Overthinking is a kind of fear. It creates tension. It makes hands heavy. It makes decisions jittery. His calm is not casualness. It is control.
You can see that control in the work. The portraits feel relaxed, even when the subject is intense. The shading has a steadiness to it, the kind you only get when you trust your process. The details are there, but they do not feel desperate. They do not feel like someone trying to prove something. They feel like someone doing what they know how to do.
He understands a principle that applies to realism in any medium. The image must breathe. A portrait that is overworked becomes stiff. A portrait that is allowed to stay soft in the right places becomes human. He leaves quiet areas. He lets transitions happen gently. He uses restraint to keep the piece alive.
It is the difference between a face that is technically accurate and a face that feels present.
Micro detail that reads as touch, translated into ink with calm precision.
Laughter as method
Mata’afa’s calm is not only technical. It is interpersonal. He is known for creating an easy atmosphere during long sessions, the kind that makes clients feel they can settle into the hours rather than endure them. He understands, as all good tattooers do, that the body is not paper. Skin has memory. People have nerves. Pain changes the way the day feels.
“Make them laugh,” he says. “Laughter is the best remedy.”
It is a simple philosophy and a generous one. It suggests he does not see tattooing as a performance of authority. He sees it as a shared ordeal, and he wants to make it lighter. A client may arrive carrying anxiety, about pain, about permanence, about handing their body over to another person’s hands for six or eight hours. Humour breaks the spell. It reminds you that you are safe. It returns you to your own body.
Clients leave not only amazed by the detail, but surprised by how manageable the experience felt. That combination is rare. High standards with low pressure. It is, in its own way, a signature.
Paradox Tattoo, the culture of getting better
To understand why Mata’afa stays sharp, you have to look at the environment he has built. Paradox Tattoo, his Melbourne studio, has the reputation of a place where artists do not coast. It is not a studio that rests on its social media feed. It is a studio that treats improvement as daily practice.
One of the practices he runs is a design challenge for the resident artists. Two subjects, a style, a body part, chosen at random. One night to design it. Then everyone shares in a group chat and votes on the most creative concept.
On the surface, it is a game. Underneath, it is a system. It forces speed. It forces invention. It forces you to find solutions under pressure. It prevents comfort from becoming complacency. It teaches, again and again, the skill that separates good artists from great ones, the ability to decide without losing quality.
“A great day for us is usually Fridays,” he says. “That’s when we have a shared lunch together at 2 PM. I buy everyone lunch and we eat together like a family.”
A family lunch is not a strategy. It is a signal. It tells the team, and the clients who sense it, that people matter. It is possible to push hard and still care. To be ambitious without becoming cruel.
The pleasure of texture
If there is one element that makes Mata’afa talk like someone describing a favourite song, it is texture.
“Texture, I loooove doing texture,” he says.
Even when a reference image arrives smooth, he finds a way to add texture anyway. “Even if there’s no texture in the reference image, I’ll add it as I go. I get bored if I don’t do texture.”
That is not a quirk. It is a clue. Texture is where realism becomes physical. Skin pores, fabric fibres, sweat beads, rust flecks, weathered leather. Texture is detail, but it is also sensation. It tells your brain what something would feel like to touch. When a tattoo nails texture, it crosses a line from image to presence.
What astonishes people is that he accomplishes this without endless days. The speed is not haste. It is mastery. Thousands of hours until the fundamentals are automatic. The hand moves without uncertainty. The eye sees the solution before the mind has time to panic.
Speed, in that sense, is clarity.
Earning attention
There is a particular kind of success that arrives when you do not chase it. It comes not as a spotlight, but as a steady recognition. A widening circle of people who understand what you are doing and start to say, quietly, pay attention.
Haunting realism, turning the human back into a meditation on mortality, tension, and stillness pure.
In an industry full of noise, Mata’afa’s power is that he has found stillness and made it compelling. “Showstoppr” is an easy name to misread until you understand what it truly describes. Not an artist who performs, but an artist whose work makes performance unnecessary. The work stops you. It asks for nothing. It simply remains.
Recognition like the Global Top 100 is, on one level, a badge. On another, it is a mirror held up to the long middle of a career, the years where no one is applauding but you keep working anyway. It says, we saw what you did in those years. We see what you are doing now.
If Mata’afa reads this and feels emotional, it should not be because it flatters him. It should be because it tells the truth. The truth is that his work does not need hype. It has presence. It holds the room not by demand, but by deserving it.
In the end, that may be his real signature. Not a particular effect or technique, though he has many. Not even a style, though his is unmistakable. His signature is a temperament. A way of moving through the craft with quiet force. A still point, steady and undeniable, around which everything else turns.
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Portfolio
A selection of Chris’ work
© Chris “Showstoppr” Mata’afa, 2026
