‘Ink Master’ season 4, episode 3 review: Will David Bell’s back problems do him in?
The last episode of “Ink Master” season 4 got pretty heated when Ashley Bennett decided to quit during judging and Kyle Dunbar gave her a piece of his mind as he told her to leave. Only two episodes of the show have aired and already the drama has been kicked up this season, but is all of this bickering, tears and quitting taking away from the art?
Flash challenge: We’re headed back to Coney Island – land of the scariest roller coasters, side show acts and stuffing your face with saltwater taffy and hot dogs on the dirtiest boardwalk you’ll ever set foot on. Welcome to Brooklyn, folks. When the artists head into the Coney Island side show, Kyle remembers back to last season when he had to tattoo eyelids at the same location and knows that this will be a tough challenge… and he was right.
The artists are broken up into groups of three: one person creates the design and the other two will each tattoo that same design on identical twins (same tattoos, each twin gets one). The catch is that there is only one set of twins and five artists will each be working on one twin at the same time.
The name of the game this week is consistency so whatever design is tattooed on on twin has to be a perfect mirror image on the other. While some teams worked really well together and got pretty identical tattoos, there were some people that deviated off of the original design, didn’t saturate the same as their partner and basically just did whatever they wanted… it seemed that bad communication really hurt some of the pairs. In the end we saw Roland, Sausage and Bubba win the flash challenge, which was good for Roland since he’s really been struggling.
Elimination tattoo: For this tattoo the artist had to show consistency with geometric shapes and we immediately worried for Roland since his line work hasn’t been great, but he really pulled out a nice tattoo. Lydia was saddled with a human canvas that wanted a tattoo on their behind (a tough area to tattoo), but she talked him into moving it. David Bell was having some terrible back pains from a previous motorcycle accident he had and ended up getting what looked like nerve blocks in his back to be able to tattoo, but he was still in so much pain that he blazed through it… and his tattoo reflected that. There were a lot of really great tattoos, but Sausage came out on top and was the first artist to have to put someone into the bottom.
Although Roland won his flash challenge and produced a pretty great elimination tattoo, Sausage put him in the bottom anyways because of his body of work. The canvas jury put David in the bottom and the judges chose Bubba. Who went home? David was sent home way before his time, but if his back was already causing him this many problems so early on it might’ve been a bit of a blessing in disguise for him. Episode Grade: B
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Photo: Spike TV