Compounding Mistakes

In a previous post I talked about a show on SpikeTV called "Ink Master." The basic premise of the show is that a group of tattoo artists are brought to one location, live together and are then given a series of challenges. At the end of each show one of the artists is sent home until eventually there is only one person left standing and that person is named Ink Master. All of that feels very standard for a reality competition show, right up to the point when you remember that we are dealing with human canvases and tattoos are permanent. That in itself is pretty disturbing, but what I really didn't like is the way the judges would just mercilessly rip on the tattoo artist's skill or needlework, completely forget that there was a person attached to that tattoo who now had to go home and face all their friends who would be well aware of all the flaws in their new artwork. It just seemed like a cruel exercise. Well, the good news for anyone who wasn't pleased with how their tat turned out on that show has another SpikeTV show they can appear on, "Tattoo Nightmares." This show specializes in people coming in, revealing the horrible mistake they made once upon a time and then telling the events which lead up to getting this bad tattoo while the tattoo artist works on covering it up as best they can.

As you can imagine, there are plenty of unnerving issues with this show. The first problem is the very idea of covering one tattoo with another tattoo, because that is like trying to get a stain out of your carpet by setting it on fire. As near as I can tell from watching this, for every inch of the original tattoo you need three inches to cover it up. Thus, every clip I have ever seen of this show ends with the customers walking out with a tattoo that covers about twice as much space as the previous design. On top of that the customers appear to give these artists free reign to design whatever they want, which is a bad idea because not paying attention to what someone was tattooing on them is what got them into this mess in the first place. Most of the tattoos have vastly different themes from what is underneath, which doesn't seem like much of a solution because I feel like people will just have to go to a third artist to cover-up their cover-up. Call me crazy, but I just don't see the biker who is unhappy with the skulls on his arm being much more pleased with a bunch of flowers surrounding a castle taking up that spot instead. The next issue I had is that for as good as these artists are the simple fact is that there are some things you can't un-see and sometimes there just isn't anything they can do. My brain is wired to immediately look for mistakes (I was really good at those hidden object paintings), so by knowing what to look for I can immediately tell what used to be under there. And if I can still see the outline you know the person whose arm is on can still see it as well.

I can't help but wonder if there has ever been a show where the person came in and their tattoo was so bad and so large the cover-up specialist told them there was nothing they could do. I mean, there has to be someone out there who made a really bad decision once upon a time and would like someone to take a crack at fixing it. I assume they candidates have been well-screen before that, but I do question if the producers would make them go through with it regardless of professional opinion, because on a couple of occasions I think removal would be the wiser course of action. For example, episode I stumbled upon last night there was a guy who came in because back in his youth he had gotten two tattoos of what were supposed to be bleeding bullet holes in the side of his head. However, the original artist didn't do a very good job and the holes looked awful (because otherwise this would have been a great idea). The customer was complaining that he was getting strange looks from the other parents at his daughter's school and to fix that problem he came up with the solution of getting a huge tattoo covering half his head which would look like his skull was ripped open and the American Flag was coming out of his brain ('merica!). Yes, I can see how that would totally end the disapproving looks.

So, basically, while I can appreciate that Spike may think they are doing these people a big favor this show is all sorts of wrong. I'm kind of hoping that since this is SpikeTV some of these tattoos are fake and just being done as dramatic retellings of some of the worst tattoos these cover-up specialists had ever seen. (Spike hasn't quite figured out the line between enhancing a "reality show" with some fake aspects or clever editing versus going over to the point of absurdity. After all, this is the same network where one second I am watching a woman flip out over being evicted from her apartment and a minute later she is in a commercial trying to get me to buy a cellphone, so it is not like Spike has never pulled that move before.) At the very least I hope the network is picking up the tabs because if these people had money to spend on a good tattoo they would not be in this position in the first place. On top of that tattoos which are this intricate are not going to be cheap, probably more expensive than laser-removal treatments would be. Of course, the concept of people searching for tattoo removal at a discounted price could be an elaborate build up to the third series in the trilogy - "Removal Nightmares".