State: South Carolina · Statute: Ban upheld in State v. White, 348 S.C. 532 (2002); legalized by Act 250 of 2004, codified at S.C. Code § 44-34-10 et seq. · Filed by The Bureau of Real Laws
The claim: tattooing was illegal in South Carolina until 2004. Verdict: REAL BUT REPEALED — and if anything, the reality ran longer than the claim. The ban fell in 2004, but South Carolinians could not get a fully legal tattoo until 2006.
South Carolina outlawed tattooing in the 1960s, when hepatitis scares were driving tattooing out of American cities — New York City had banned the practice in 1961 amid an outbreak reportedly traced to a Coney Island tattoo artist. While most states eventually traded prohibition for regulation, South Carolina simply froze. For more than forty years, tattooing in the state existed only underground or across state lines; the ban, as a later Attorney General opinion put it, was a "general prohibition against all tattooing in South Carolina," with the only lawful tattooing confined to the licensed healing arts.
The ban's last stand came in State v. White, decided by the South Carolina Supreme Court in 2002. A tattoo artist challenged the prohibition on free-speech grounds, and the court was unmoved: it held that tattooing was not sufficiently communicative to warrant First Amendment protection outweighing the state's public-safety interests, and upheld the statute. Tattooing, the court effectively ruled, was conduct the state could forbid outright.
What the courts would not do, the legislature did two years later. Act No. 250 of 2004, effective June 17, 2004, replaced the prohibition with a licensing regime administered by the Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC), codified at South Carolina Code § 44-34-10 et seq. Under § 44-34-20(B), a tattoo facility must obtain a DHEC license; its artists must hold certifications in bloodborne pathogens and tattoo infection control, plus current American Red Cross first aid and adult CPR certification. With the act, South Carolina became the 49th state to allow tattooing. Only Oklahoma held out, legalizing in 2006.
Legalization on paper was not ink in skin. DHEC still had to write the licensing standards — the General Assembly approved the tattoo facility regulations in 2005 — so the first legal parlors only opened in 2006; the first lawful tattoo is generally credited to a Myrtle Beach shop in March of that year. And South Carolina kept some of the nation's strictest rules: tattooing anyone under 18 is unlawful even with parental consent, punishable by fines or imprisonment, and state law still prohibits tattoos on the head, face, and neck.
The Bureau's ruling: for most of living memory, the Palmetto State treated a tattoo needle like contraband. The ban was real, it survived the state Supreme Court in 2002, and it died by statute in 2004. South Carolina didn't just lift a ban — it was dragged, forty years late, into the era of the licensed tattoo parlor.
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