I’ve been watching this really cool TV series lately that’s in America. It’s a tattooing competition with about twenty of the finest tattoo artists in America who go head to head to compete against each other for the title of being the best tattoo artist. Each week they get given different tasks. The tasks can range from being art and technique-based to focusing solely on creativity. The contestants get given a certain amount of time to tattoo someone and then once that time is up they get told to stop tattooing. The tattoos are then critiqued by judges and the host of the series. Based on these critiques, the judges decide who is the winner of the challenge for that week and who will be up for nomination.
It’s quite interesting to watch as you end up seeing everybody’s different skills. Some of the artists are better than others at certain styles. There was one challenge the other week where they had to do realism tattoos. This episode was particularly interesting to watch as a lot of the contestants were blatantly struggling with drawing realism. There is a good realism tattoo artist near Brisbane who I am confident would have blown all of the contests out of the water that day. I was quite surprised with the artwork the judges chose to win. Someone had a falcon head tattooed on their back. While the piece was definitely good, I didn’t think it was the best. The artist did capture a lot of amazing detail in the eagle’s eyes and feathers, however.
It’s not the first time I’ve disagreed with the judges, but more often than not they definitely make the right choice. No doubt they have much better knowledge than I do about tattoos. I’ve only ever visited a tattoo artist once and that was a tribal tattooist who wound up tattooing that cliche tribal art armband on me that everyone was getting in the early 2000s. The tattoo turned out great, but I do remember that it was something that absolutely everyone was getting done.