South Korea to bring tattoos out of the shadows with a ‘medical act’ reform

Under a new law in the making, South Korea’s tattoo culture and associated industry is about to mainstream again.

In 1992, a Supreme Court ruling had declared tattooing as ‘medical’ work and barred non-medical personnel from engaging in tattooing. The ruling essentially drove South Korea’s tattooing industry underground. But now a new bill passed by lawmakers, the Tattooist Act, may change that.

Under the law, both tattoos and semi-permanent makeup are defined as “tattooing acts” and will licenced professionals will be allowed to practice the craft without the Supreme Court-mandated medical professionals’ requirement, according to Yonhap news agency.

However, tattoo removal by non-medical professionals and tattooing of minors without parental consent will remain barred under the new law.

The law also seeks to settle one irony that had plagued South Korea for over three decades — it was never illegal to get a tattoo but it was essentially illegal to get a tattoo as tattoo artists were required to be medical professionals.

South Korea’s booming —but underground— tattoo industry

To be clear, the tattoo culture never faded in South Korea. Plenty of people got inked but the process took place in underground studios hidden in lanes or basements of buildings. But now, after President Lee Jae Myung will sign the bill into law in the coming days, those studious are set to go mainstream.

“Now we can be proud of what we do for a living and work in spaces with large windows like hair salons. We may have to renovate the studio and retrain our artists to meet those requirements [hygiene and safety], but it will be worth it,” Heo Jun-ho, who runs a tattoo parlour in Seoul, told The New York Times.

Even though the Supreme Court mandated standards that essentially banned the tattooing industry, there were around 350,000 tattoo artists in South Korea as of 2021 by one estimate, according to BBC News.

Most of these artists specialised in semi-permanent make-up for lips, eyebrows, or hairlines, and relatively few of these had any medical qualifications and instead, most come from art or beauty backgrounds like elsewhere in the world, the report said.

Historically, tattoos in South Korea had been controversial and carried a baggage in modern times. Conservatives linked tattoos to delinquency and, for centuries in the medieval era, people were forcibly given tattoos on their face or arms listing their crimes or branding them as slaves, as per The Times.

However, over the past many years, South Korean pop culture —k-pop— has normalised tattoos to an extent. And the acceptance has been on the rise.