‘Ink Master: Rivals’ season 5, episode 7 review: Did Emily Elegado tattoo despite her illness?

With 2 losses in a row, Emily Elegado has a lot to prove on this week’s episode of “Ink Master: Rivals”, but with the preview revealing her battling some sort of an illness, we worry that this is the week we are going to lose her.

Elimination tattoo: Once again there is no flash challenge and they are testing the fundamentals of tattooing (line work, shading, color packing and anything that goes along with making a clean tattoo) with American traditional tattoos. They are tattooing in teams of three, they will be tag teaming and only one person can tattoo at a time switching out every hour. The teams are chosen randomly by skull pick by the canvases. Here are the teams:

Angel, Emily and Joshua: Angel and Emily already don’t get along, and with instigator extraordinaire Joshua it’s hard to know what’s going to happen (and this is why we love him). While Angel and Joshua start to get the artwork prepared for the canvas, Emily is no where to be found. So where is she? Back at the loft getting sick in the bathroom. She later reveals to Don that she has endometriosis (which is very, very painful) and isn’t sure if she is going to be able to tattoo, but decides to bare through the pain and do her part.

Eric, Cleen Rock One and Tyesha:  Eric and Cleen are happy to be working together, but they think Tyesha is dead weight they have to carry. Eric and Cleen try to do the bulk of the harder work, so that Tyesha has less that she could “mess up”.

Julia, Mark and Jason:  Julia and Mark have been in the bottom a lot so we hope to see Jason take the lead, especially since they are doing a clipper ship and he just did one last week that the judges weren’t thrilled about. Julia has Mark over her shoulder almost the entire time and although Mark has landed in the bottom more times then he probably wishes, he still thinks his work is great.

Aaron, Don and Cris: Aaron immediately takes the lead and it rubs Don the wrong way. Aaron feels that his line work is the best, that Cris’ color fill is great, but that Don “sucks”.

Judging: The tattoos are being judged as a team, with no human canvas jury. Oliver is stoked about how the tattoos all came out saying that normally American traditional week has problems, but there was no loser in the bunch this time. The best tattoo of the day went to Joshua, Emily and Angel (they are safe from elimination, thanks to Joshua) and it was nice to see the judges actually giving out a best tattoo of the day since that hasn’t happened in a while.

The remaining teams have to collectively pick out who is the weakest artist on their team and send them back for judging. Jason talks about nominating himself because he is being forced to be the person to chose between Mark and Julia – a completely crazy move. Honorable is one thing, but right out crazy is something else.

Tyesha is put up by her team mates, Don is put up by his team mates (and himself) and Julia is put up by Jason and Mark (it seems someone talked Jason off the ledge of nominating himself). The three artists face off against each other and they will all be doing the same design created by Oliver. They were warned about placement before hand, but Tyesha put the tattoo outline on backwards, while Julia and Don didn’t. So who went home? Unfortunately we lost Tyesha.

It was tough to lose Tyesha, but at the same time if we were going to lose her, it was nice to see her go home on a good tattoo where everyone’s tattoos were strong. Episode grade: B+

If you are looking for more news on “Ink Master: Rivals” then head over to the link here where you can check out previews, reviews, interviews with eliminated artists (our latest ones are with Caroline Evans, Elton “LT” Duarte, Jayvo Scott, Tim Lees and Ryan Eternal) and podcasts all about the show (or head here if you want to download our podcasts from iTunes).

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