S13.E04: Battle Lines

[thewhiteowl]

The strength of teamwork is on the line in a painstaking test of legibility.

[Diane Mars]

According to this preview on Facebook, it looks like we kinda have been heard ! Yay !!!!!

 

Edited January 28, 2020 by Diane Mars

[MeThinkMeNot]

I feel like Raul should have went home, even though his tattoo was better than Arlene's and Jordan's. Arlene's handle was the wrong way and Jordan's tattoo was just bad, but Raul didn't follow the theme.

[RoadFullOfPromise]

I think this episode showed again that the regional tram split is complicating things. If any one team gets wiped out by deserved eliminations, the whole conceit of the season falls apart. I’m not sure what the answer is going forward (short of just going back to a whole new group of individuals) but it becomes increasingly predictable in terms of need to balance the team numbers. And since that one dude voluntarily left the competition in the first episode but they also had an elimination, they’ve left themselves open for a week of saying no one goes home (if it bails out the team concept when a dreadful tattoo should send someone home but the team numbers would be too skewed). 

[Princess Sparkle]

Ok, I must admit - I have multiple tattoos, but I have no idea what makes skin better or worse for tattooing. Is there some skin thats really better than others? Because more so than normal, we heard a lot of "The skin is too soft", "The skin is causing blowouts", "I can't work with this". Was that all just excuses (which is what I'm guessing)

I felt bad for Bob's canvas; the design was cool but some of those dots were just ridiculously blown out. Jordan was lucky too; there's a closeup of her tattoo on the Ink Master instagram and it is ROUGH. Her top tattoo was fine; the bottom one was a total mess.

[RoadFullOfPromise]

28 minutes ago, Princess Sparkle said:

Ok, I must admit - I have multiple tattoos, but I have no idea what makes skin better or worse for tattooing. Is there some skin thats really better than others? Because more so than normal, we heard a lot of "The skin is too soft", "The skin is causing blowouts", "I can't work with this". Was that all just excuses (which is what I'm guessing)

I’ve only got one (and have only had it since September) but when I got it I told the artist that I was fine with either forearm. I’d had really gnarly poison ivy back in June, and it was primarily on my right arm (and morphed into cellulitis- GROSS). I made sure to tell her that, because I still had a few light scarring lines but wanted to give her the full story. Once she confirmed with me that I truly did not care which arm and wanted to leave it up to her discretion as the artist, she chose the left arm (that hadn’t had wonky poison ivy). I don’t know for sure that that was the reason, but I suspect it was.

[Charlesman]

8 hours ago, Princess Sparkle said:

Ok, I must admit - I have multiple tattoos, but I have no idea what makes skin better or worse for tattooing. Is there some skin thats really better than others? Because more so than normal, we heard a lot of "The skin is too soft", "The skin is causing blowouts", "I can't work with this". Was that all just excuses (which is what I'm guessing)

 

I don't know either, but, I don't know if we've ever seen the artists who go up to ask what people want before they assign skulls also ask to see their existing tattoos and see who is prone to blowouts. Seems they just go by what they want to draw most. I know we've seen them ask "how long have you sat for" and "how many tattoos do you have already" to avoid those who will tap out early or aren't going to be able to hold up to the pain, but, I don't remember seeing "lemme see what your skin can hold" as one of the questions.

[dstann]

On 1/30/2020 at 2:57 PM, MeThinkMeNot said:

I feel like Raul should have went home, even though his tattoo was better than Arlene's and Jordan's. Arlene's handle was the wrong way and Jordan's tattoo was just bad, but Raul didn't follow the theme.

I feel the opposite, while Raul did a really bad job with the theme he at least tried to do a schematic.  But I thought the quality of the other 2 were so bad that one of them deserved to go home.

[Charlesman]

There's a video on the website where Arlene tries to claim the knife wasn't backwards. She's deep in denial.

[hookedontv]

I binged all the episodes this past weekend. All I can say is thank goodness Arlene is gone. She was annoyingly under my skin from the very first episode! 

[RoxiP]

I'm 61 and my skin is very dry and very fragile.  I would imagine that if I attempted to get a tattoo the artist would have a difficult time because my skin tears easily.

[Etta Place]

If you think about the fact that a tattoo needs to go to the same depth of skin consistently, it seems like skin that is loose (like on someone who has lost a lot of weight) would be hard to stretch to put the ink in. As RoxiP says, skin that is thin and dry would be hard to work on without damage. Tattooing over scar tissue has its own issues - they've done some challenges involving that sort of thing in the past. For them, ideally the person has young, hydrated skin that is over a decent musculature rather than wobbly fat. 

But that's the ideal, and there is a small percentage of people who are going to fit that, so they are (or should be) used to dealing with other types of skin. Some are still going to be better than others, of course. I have several tattoos, and I'm working on a big one on my arm right now, which is over its share of wobbly fat. 🙂 My husband has a couple, and he's so skinny they're mostly over bone. I think that's more about it being not fun for him than for the artist though!