Blood, Sweat & Ink

"Son of a bitch!" swore Kyle as their van drove into the gates of what looked like a prison complex.

"Danggit!" Maddie added, ever the lady in spite of her shaved head.

"This should be interesting," commented ES, eying the barbed wire fence.

"I'm not sure this is safe," Frank said nervously.

Lydia's mind went a million places. What kind of Flash Challenge was in a prison?

And then it hit her: Prison Style tattoos. Of course.

After she left for college in the midst of her parent's divorce, Lydia became determined to pay her own way. Her father had been against her decision to be an artist to begin with, declaring that the only people who were artists were-his words, not hers-faggots and lazy motherfuckers who didn't want to work. Art was a hobby, not something you did to pay the bills. Her mother would have paid for art school, no doubt, but with the pending divorce, Mom was already going through a huge emotional burden, why add a financial one as well?

So she sold Adderall to pay for tuition. Reprehensible, she knew, but it was either sell drugs, work in fast food, or become an escort. Working in fast food was out-her father had met the woman he cheated on Mom with working at Burger King-and as for escorting, no way in hell. She had been roommates with a couple of girls who did that and didn't think the money was worth the emotional toll it took on them.

So she took the lesser of two evils. Her dad had been essentially trying to drug her into compliance since Lydia was a little girl, and she saw it as a big Fuck You Dad gesture.

Unfortuately the undercover agent that bought the pills from her didn't see it that way and she spent four years in prison for selling drugs.

In there, she put her art skills to use and learned how to tattoo in prison. Lydia told people she'd been tattooing for fifteen years, but truth be told, it was more like nineteen years, if you counted her stint in prison.

Dave greeted the contestants when they got out, introduced the other judges, introduced Tatu Baby as the seventeenth contestant and announced they'd be doing, as Lydia predicted, Prison Style tattoos.

The other guys cursed and complained, but got to work. Her "client" was a two hundred pound giant named Vinnie who spent the entire time leering at her as she tattooed a simple dagger with a rose wrapped around it, figuring that she might as well keep it simple. After all, she *did*only have a couple of hours.

Dave called for the artists to put their needles down and stop inking, then asked the artists to stand with the prisoners they'd been working on. The three judges the went down the line and critiqued the works in front of them.

Many of them, it seems, had never done a single needle tattoo in their lives-and it showed. Made Rich's deck of playing cards looked shaky. Ally had done a skull, which immediately ripped apart for not having a lot of detail. Chris had also done a skull, which was kind average. When they got down to Mystical Mike's pocket watch, Lydia had to supress a laugh at the crudeness of it, and apparently so was James Danger (it might have been shadenfrude glee-rumor has it that the older man had to be physically restrained from decking Mike at the Ink Master party). Kyle was complemented on his samurai mask looking smooth, a compliment which the normally blunt and abrasive man seemed grateful for.

Finally they reached Lydia.

"Decided to keep it simple, huh?" Oliver Peck joked, a smile peeking out of his mustache.

"All I did during my apprenticeship was Old School designs," Lydia explained. "He wouldn't let me do any other style until I mastered them."

"Our compliments to your teacher," Dave responded.

"Thank you, sir."

The judges left the room to debate, then came out to reveal that Joey had won the Flash Challenge and told the contestants to head to the loft.

As they were leaving the prison, she noticed her sister standing behind one of the cameras, impassive.