Ink Master: Angels review: Who walked out during Houston episode?

We’ve written about a lot of different battles on Ink Master: Angels over the past season and a half, but there was something about Tuesday night’s episode that was different. For the first time, we’ve seen someone decide that they would rather take their ball and go home rather than judge the Angel Face-Off.

This artist tonight was Blake Thomas, a man who really couldn’t be bothered to participate anymore after he lost to Mike Wallace in the second round. Was he right that he had a big, ambitious tattoo? We certainly do think so. Yet, at the same time his tattoo was a technical mess. He’s probably a good artist to get if you want some interesting, ambitious and colorful designs, but he just didn’t work all that well within the confines of this sort of technical competition. We just don’t understand the logic that goes into something like quitting here since really, all you are doing in the process of that is hurting yourself and your own ability to bring in people to your shop after the fact. Sure, Blake did make a name for himself tonight, but we’re not sure it was a good name. People have to be able to take criticism and that seemed to be one of his biggest problems tonight.

As for the remainder of this episode, what we effectively saw was the journey of Wallace from a cocky, super-green tattoo artist to someone who could end up becoming a major player down the line. You can tell that he just hasn’t had a whole lot of real, technical teaching in his life — he’s very capable of being a great artist if he trains hard and he seems capable of doing that.

Unfortunately, there was never really any doubt as to whether or not he would beat Ryan Ashley Malarkey at the end — he was just in over his depth over someone who is one of the best out there. He did improve but not by anywhere near enough. The best thing that he can do is grow from this and maybe in two or three years he will be a contender outright for Ink Master in some other shape or form.

CarterMatt Verdict

Overall, though, this was the weakest episode of the season just because none of the artists were altogether great throughout. We liked Mike and want to keep rooting for him, but there wasn’t a whole lot of heavy competition at any point throughout. As a matter of fact, the artists were so weak in the first challenge that the judges couldn’t declare a winner!

For a city as big as Houston, we’re mostly just surprised that the quality of the art wasn’t head and shoulders above some of what we’ve seen in some other places to date.

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