‘Ink Master’ season 4, episode 12 review: Did Matti or Halo make the finale?

Matti HixsonWe are down to the final four on “Ink Master” and while it was easy to pick these four as the top contenders from the beginning of the season, it’s a little harder to pick a winner out of the remaining artists – They are all so good that any of them could walk away with the title (but since Scott Marshall is the judges favorite we have our money on him).

Elimination tattoo: There is no flash challenge this week, and instead we had two elimination tattoos. The first tattoo is a very sensitive tattoo as the artists tattoo women who have all survived breast cancer. There were a lot of really beautiful flower tattoos by Matti, Halo and Sausage, but Scott’s canvas got cold feet right before getting her butterfly piece inked. She ended up agreeing to get a smaller version of the fluttering butterflies, but from far away it was hard to make out what they were.

The second elimination tattoo brought back canvases from the first flash challenge (the convention style tattoos) as three of the canvases wanted cover ups and one canvas was getting a new tattoo. The cool thing about this challenge is that the canvases got to pick their artists, so they interviewed each person to see who they wanted.  Halo had a very smart strategy as he told each canvas that he’s not great at doing cover up tattoos (even though he won the cover up challenge earlier this season) in hopes that the blank canvas would pick him. It totally worked and he got the canvas he wanted.

Judging: The judges loved all of the first tattoos, but when it came to the cover ups – there were some problems. Scott used yellow in his tattoo (like Jim and King Ruck did in their covers ups that sent them to the bottom) and just like other artists before him, the tattoo he was trying to cover up still peeked through. You might think that this would be enough to stop him from going to the finale, but you’d be wrong because he’ll be standing there beside Sausage (who won tattoo of the day) next week. So who is going with them to the finale? Even though Matti’s cover up was a big blue mess (and he can’t do lettering) he still beat out Halo’s flowers. We expect that if someone is voted back again for next season that we will see Halo again. He was robbed.

What was really interesting was seeing the vote by Twitter users of who they thought should go home tonight and not go to the finale. Scott was voted by the internet as the person they did not want to see in the finale and after seeing his tattoos tonight (and for the past few weeks) it’s hard to argue with them. Episode grade: A

Want more “Ink Master” season 4 news, including exit interviews with the eliminated contestants? Then head over to the link here and enjoy. We podcast about the show each week so if you missed some of the episodes and want to catch up then you can listen to them at CarterMatt at the link here or download the podcasts over at iTunes.

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Photo: Spike TV

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