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Business & Tech

Tattoo and Piercing Licensing Fees To Possibly Triple

In an effort to more tightly regulate the industry, state officials propose a $70 - $100 hike in various license fees.

After a proposal was announced in December stating that the Missouri Division of Professional Registration’s Office of Tattooing, Body Piercing and Branding was proposing tripling the price of a tattoo or body piercing license, many tattoo artists and piercers were outraged.

The public comment period for the proposed changes closed Wednesday,
but Eron McKinney, a licensed tattoo artist at Urban Expressions Tattoos 2, located on the -Berkeley border, said that it’s not the licensed artists the state should be worrying about.

“We’re paying all our fees, doing everything by the book,” he said. “You’ve got shops out there charging extremely low amounts to draw in clientele, but the reason they can do that is because they’re not doing what they need to do to keep people safe.”

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Good news for McKinney and other licensed artists—the fees are being raised in order to increase regulation in the industry, including investigations of illegal shops and unlicensed artists. Currently, tattoo artists and body piercers are required by the state to have an apprenticeship that includes 300 hours of training and 50 completed procedures if they seek to be licensed.

The Division of Professional Registration’s Office of Tattooing, Body Piercing and Branding expects to see a reported $120,000 in revenue throughout the two-year licensing period. That money will also be used for annual inspections, along with legal services to handle those who have licenses removed.

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“You’ve got people going to the hospital and stuff because they got bad work from these places,” McKinney said. “And then they get scared to come to us, even though we’re going to do the job right.”

According to the Hazelwood’s city planner, Earl Bradfield, tattooing and piercing establishments aren’t permitted in Hazelwood due to zoning issues, but for many working at establishments on the city's borders like McKinney there's a long list of things he says the the division can monitor.

“They need to go to some of the shops that are doing work without being licensed and actually control them,” McKinney said. “Make sure they’re not tattooing underage kids [and] make sure they’re doing the correct procedures.”

McKinney said underage teenagers often try to get tattooed at Urban Expressions, but they’re turned away without parental consent, as required by state law. He said he often hears stories of other local shops who don’t have such strict rules from these kids, many of whom he said claim to have received consent-free tattoos at other shops, and for lower prices. He said that it seems like people who are trying to do the right thing by keeping up on their licenses and following the rules are the ones being punished.

“A lot of places here aren’t even doing paperwork," he said. "Basically, they’re not even being regulated at all.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control, tattoo artists who do not practice proper safety procedures put themselves and their clients at risk for infections such as hepatitis, tuberculosis and HIV. Missouri’s current penalty for unlicensed work is a class B misdemeanor charge with a fee between $500 and $1,000.

The division's proposed hikes would make a tattoo artist’s two-year license fee increase from $30 to $100. A license for practitioners who perform both tattoos and piercings would go from $40 to $120, and shops that do both would have to pay $300, up from $200.

The fee hike is a return to the '03 rate levels the division set. Since then, the fees — which must be paid by tattoo artists and piercers every two years to renew their licenses — have decreased each year. Fees have gotten to as low as $5 in '09.

Matt Barton, a spokesman for the Missouri Department of Insurance, which administers the division, said the increase is based on a five-year analysis that shows growth in the number of tattoo shops and artists in Missouri.

Any changes will have to be approved by the Missouri legislature’s Joint Committee on Administrative Rules.

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