Ink Master premiered in 2012 at the height
of the "shows about tattoos" craze.
The premise of the show is pretty simple - a
bunch of tattoo artists compete to see who
is the best overall artist.
The last artist standing will be crowned,
wait for it, the "Ink Master," and win a cash
prize.
While the popular show has made it through
plenty of seasons and two spinoffs, it may
not be exactly what it seems.
Reality TV has a reputation for not being
all that real, and it looks like Ink Master
is no different.
Down to the wire?
For an elimination challenge, artists may
be given 6 hours to do their work.
According to redditor Coreymatchem, a tattooed
participant on the show, the time limit is
actually pretty meaningless.
On the show, judge Dave Navarro appears to
give warnings of how much time is left, but
Corey said that's all done in editing, to
present a false sense of urgency.
"That's it, time is up, sharpies down!"
In his experience, some artists were finished
hours in advance, while other artists even
went over time.
Redditor Tattood_Mom similarly claimed in
an AMA that on her season, Dave Navarro's
timed warnings were all filmed at one time
and edited in to the show after the fact.
Human Canvas Jury
A big part of elimination process is choosing
a handful of the "worst" tattoos that have
to go head-to-head before the judges.
In many seasons, this is, in part, accomplished
with the help of the "human canvas jury,"
which is made up of the newly-tattooed participants.
"You're here because the human canvas jury
determined that you had the worst tattoo of
the day."
Coreymatchem was on a jury twice, and he explained
in his Reddit AMA, it was all fake.
He says they did discuss as a group what they
all thought of the tattoos, but producers
only included the things they had told the
jury to say.
Corey claims his jury actually picked an entirely
different tattoo than the one that made it
to air, but the show was edited to make it
look otherwise.
Uninvolved judges
The show does a good job of showing how the
judges regularly go from studio to studio,
checking out all the progress.
But according to Coreymatchem, that's totally
staged too.
He claims the judges are actually barely on
set at all, and that they came in for about
five minutes to do the walk-through on camera.
In the end, this gets edited to look like
the three judges were in the room the whole
time.
Redditor Jdizzle, a human canvas on a different
season, adds that some of the judges seem
to make things up on the fly, not really sticking
to any standards or guidelines when it comes
to judging.
Not about the art?
For a show that's supposed to be focused on
tattoo artistry, there's a lot of time spent
on weird "flash challenges" that don't reflect
realistic tattoo scenarios.
The flash challenge can be anything from ice
sculpting to burning objects with live electrical
wires.
Season 3 artist Frank McManus was required
to tattoo an inmate in a prison cell with
one needle and extremely poor lighting.
With limited resources and equipment, he felt
there was no way he could produce work to
the best of his ability, nor could anyone
else.
As he told PennLive,
"[The challenges] don't have much to do with
what tattooing really is."
To make things worse, some challenges are
physically daunting.
Season 1 artist Heather Sinn told LA Weekly
that between tattooing pig corpses in a freezing
meat locker and getting sunburned while working
on a car, the show was more like Fear Factor
than anything else.
She acknowledges that she was probably too
sensitive for the show, but also should have
known it was never really going to be about
art.
All part of the plan
One of the biggest charges against any reality
show is that it's all plotted out ahead of
time, and based on what past contestants have
said, Ink Master is exactly that.
During an NBC interview, artist Kyle Dunbar
said that one of the hardest things for him
to deal with on the show was watching the
judges play favorites - praising a tattoo
with noticeable flaws from an artist they
liked, while simultaneously critiquing the
same flaws from a different artist.
Coreymatchem noted that many shots are just
flat-out staged, and contestants are instructed
beforehand how they need to act and react.
For example, human canvases are given headphones,
but the producers actually just stick them
on long enough to get a shot on camera - because
the headphones are made by a sponsor.
Apparently, the team behind Ink Master also
tried make the show seem a little saltier
than it actually was.
Heather Sinn told LA Weekly that a producer
told the contestants that if they wanted to
go to sleep, they better start talking about
each other on camera because nothing they
were actually talking about was going to make
it to air.
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