Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
♪
- Welcome.
The eight of you have outlasted three artists,
but in this competition, you must be ready for anything.
More veteran artists will return,
and only one of you will earn $100,000,
a feature in "Inked" magazine,
and title of Ink Master.
This week,
you're being judged on detail.
- Detail is what makes
a very mundane tattoo look extraordinary.
- Today you must tattoo something so unique that
in this courtroom, it could be the difference between
a conviction and an acquittal:
a fingerprint.
- Fingerprints are comprised of so many little concentric lines
and tiny little details.
Putting that many lines close together can be
incredibly difficult without screwing up.
- But that is not all.
For this flash challenge, the judges aren't the only ones
inspecting your work,
because today we are joined
by a forensics expert.
Detective Adrian Gardner is a crime scene investigator
specializing in latent fingerprint analysis
and comparison.
And she's here to determine if your tattoo
can stand up as evidence in a court of law.
- This is crazy.
- At a crime scene, if a latent fingerprint
is recovered and a suspect is established,
we then compare the two fingerprints to each other,
looking for disagreement.
If any disagreement is found, then the print is excluded.
- If I don't nail the detail on this fingerprint
and my tattoo is off by one line, the forensic expert--
that's her job; she's gonna catch it.
- Let's bring in your canvases.
♪
You have each been randomly assigned a canvas.
Each of your canvases has brought in a loved one,
whose fingerprint they want tattooed.
Detective Gardner will fingerprint each person.
Then you must tattoo an exact replica of that print
onto your canvas.
If you don't pay attention to detail,
your canvas will end up with someone else's print.
- Having to tattoo the fingerprint of a loved one
definitely raises the stakes.
If we [bleep] this up, they're gonna tell us
right in front of the person that we've done it on.
- My station's right over here.
- Tattoos of fingerprints are the ultimate test of detail.
- Your husband? - Yes.
- Construction worker? - Yes.
- I know. - You can tell. [laughs]
- I can tell.
- Every little line has to match up to every other line,
or else the analyst is not gonna recognize this
as the same print.
- Your prints are pretty soft, so I'm gonna see if I can
blow them up and get some more detail.
My canvas is an older gal,
and I'm completely screwed because of it.
Her skin is much more elastic, and her fingerprints
are nowhere near as defined.
- Sit over here, but have your shoulder kind of off.
It's really important for me to get back on the horse.
The judges think I don't have any technical ability.
They're mistaken.
I'm gonna get this as perfect as I can,
show them I'm not just an artist; I'm a tattoo artist.
- You have one hour.
- Are you as nervous as I am?
- I'm gonna challenge myself with this one and
make the fingerprint as close to size as I possibly can
without losing the detail.
Looking good.
I need to win these skull picks so I can personally
hand the veteran artists the worst skulls.
Hey, Mark, um,
eat [bleep].
- I love you, sweetheart.
- You go ahead and just jump around and fidget
as much as you want.
I'm doing this heart because I just can't get the detail
that everybody else does, but I can win points on creativity.
And my canvas is gonna walk out
with the coolest tattoo in the room.
- I like how you shaped it like a heart; awesome.
- I've started an alliance with two of the strongest players.
If I can't get this skull pick, hopefully one of them will.
The last thing we need is a veteran getting control
of the skull picks, especially Cleen.
- This challenge is extremely difficult.
Most of my tattoos, there's room for artistic interpretation.
It's easy to hide little mistakes.
But in this challenge, there's no room for error.
If I mess up, I can't hide it.
And I'm gonna go around and, like, thicken up some lines
so it really looks just like the print.
- Five, four,
three, two,
one.
That's it.
Time's up. Machines down.
No more ink.
- That looks exactly like it. [laughs]
- It's got his scar in there and everything.
- You like? - Yeah.
- Good deal, thank you.
- Christian's trying to camouflage his crappy line work
with a bunch of extra garbage around it.
Why are you doing that on a detail challenge?