Body Art and United States Law

A second discipline worth stating, because it is what most of this subject gets wrong: an absence in a search is not an absence in law. Where this page reports that a word does not appear in a statute, the full text was downloaded and the occurrences machine-counted. Where a fetch failed or returned a navigation page instead of the law, the jurisdiction was dropped, not guessed at.

Thirty-four rows across twenty-three states and one county. Several states appear twice because two different instruments do two different jobs. Every state not listed here is either in the open-items section below or was not reached at all — the absence of a state from this table says nothing about its law.

1. Named in the licensing scheme

Nine of the jurisdictions above write branding, scarification or both into the definition of the trade they license: Washington, Arkansas, Colorado, Louisiana, Minnesota, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire and Oregon. The wording differs in ways that matter. Washington and Arkansas name scarification directly. Minnesota reaches it by widening a different term, so that “body piercing” in Minnesota law covers suspension, subdermal implantation and tongue bifurcation as well. Michigan, Missouri and New Hampshire license branding and never mention scarification at all.

2. Licensed by statute, suspended by rule

Oregon is the only state found doing both. The legislature created scarification and dermal implanting as statutory fields of practice under ORS 690.350, and the Health Licensing Office then closed both by rule until training exists. The rule history runs from HLA 16-2011, certified effective 1 January 2012, and the two rules remain in the compilation marked effective 17 June 2025. Oregon has therefore maintained a licence category nobody can be licensed in for roughly fourteen years. It is neither a licensing state nor a prohibition state, and describing it as either is wrong on the face of the instruments.

3. Swept in without ever being named

This is the mechanism the secondary literature misses entirely, because the word being searched for is not in the statute. Several states define tattooing in terms that include producing a scar, which pulls scarification inside a licensing scheme that never uses the word. Set the two definitions side by side:

Texas uses the identical construction at § 146.001(3). Delaware, Michigan and Missouri each define a tattoo to include “an indelible design made upon the body of another person by production of scars other than by branding” — a phrase that reaches cutting while expressly carving branding back out of it. New Hampshire's is “by the insertion of pigment under the skin or by the production of scars.” Kentucky goes furthest of all: its tattooing definition opens with “the act of producing scars on a human being,” and its body-piercing definition covers penetrating the skin “to make a hole, mark, or scar.” Florida's legislative-intent subsection speaks of “practices that prick, pierce, or scar the skin.”

What follows from that is narrow and should be stated narrowly: in those states the practice falls inside the definitional scope of a licensing statute. Whether a regulator has ever applied it that way is a separate question, and no enforcement action doing so was located for any of them.

4. Prohibited

New Jersey prohibits by rule and does it precisely. Under N.J.A.C. 8:27-2.6(a) an operator must prevent “the implantation of any object under the skin” and “the performance of scarification or the removal of pigment by laser.” Branding is not in that list. New Jersey defines branding in the same chapter — “the application of a heated material (usually metal) to the skin, creating a serious burn that eventually results in a scar” — and leaves it out of “body art,” which the rule confines to piercing, tattooing and permanent cosmetics. It reappears one chapter later, in the closure criteria, where allowing “the performance of implants, branding, and/or cutting at a body art establishment” is listed as a ground for immediate closure. Two different instruments doing two different things, and flattening them into “New Jersey bans branding and scarification” loses the distinction.

Hennepin County, Minnesota is the outright case, and it is a county rather than a state: “No individual shall: Conduct branding, cutting, implantation, suspension, or scarification of another individual.” Minnesota state law licenses those same practices. Where a person stands in Minnesota decides the answer.

5. Reserved to physicians

Nevada's NAC 444.00811 is the most comprehensive provision of its kind located in this research. It classifies the whole field as medicine and then enumerates it: “extreme body modification” means any method other than tattooing, permanent makeup or body piercing used to alter the body for decorative or cultural purposes, “including, without limitation, scarification, branding, cutting, skin peeling, scleral tattooing, subdermal or transdermal implants, suspension piercing, dermal punching, amputation, trepanation, tongue or penis splitting, castration, circumcision, penectomy, saline injection and vacuum pumping.”

The tongue-splitting statutes work the same way on one procedure. Illinois, Delaware and New York each reserve it to a licensed physician or dentist. Delaware writes the consequence into the statute: an unlawful split “constitutes both the practice of medicine without a license and the practice of dentistry without a license.” Texas is the outlier, because its statute carries no professional exception on its face — “A person may not perform tongue splitting” — while its implementing rule, 25 TAC § 229.413, prohibits only the venue: “in a tattoo or body piercing studio, or at a temporary location.” Both levels are in force and they do not say the same thing. Anyone citing Texas should cite the pair.

And the states that say nothing

Silence is a finding too, and it is established by counting rather than by failing to notice. California's Safe Body Art Act regulates branding by name and never uses the word scarification. Ohio's chapter is titled “Tattooing or Body Piercing Services” and contains no occurrence of brand, scar, tongue or implant. Wisconsin's administrative chapter and Iowa's tattooing permit section return the same zero. In those states the licensing scheme does not reach the practice; that is not the same as the practice being permitted, and no state authority saying either way was located.

A cryo-brand or a chemical scarring is inside the definition in Colorado and in Hennepin County and outside it in California, Missouri, Michigan, New Hampshire and New Jersey. Nothing about the procedure changed; the definition did.

• Arizona Revised Statutes § 13-3721 — Arizona State Legislature.
• Arkansas Code §§ 17-26-601, 17-26-613 — enrolled text of Act 900 of the 2021 Regular Session (S.B. 625), Arkansas General Assembly.
• California Health & Safety Code §§ 119300–119328 (Safe Body Art Act) — California Legislative Information, section by section.
• Colorado, Body Art Establishments, 6 CCR 1010-22 — Code of Colorado Regulations, Department of Public Health and Environment.
• Delaware Code, Title 11 §§ 1114 and 1114A — Delaware Code Online.
• Florida Statutes § 381.0075 — Florida Legislature, 2026 Florida Statutes.
• 720 ILCS 5/12-10.2 — Illinois General Assembly.
• Iowa Code § 10A.531 — Iowa Legislature.
• Kentucky Revised Statutes § 211.760 — Kentucky Legislature.
• Louisiana Administrative Code, Title 51, Part XXVIII (Commercial Body Art) — Louisiana Department of Health sanitary code compilation.
• Michigan Compiled Laws § 333.13101 — Michigan Legislature.
• Minnesota Statutes ch. 146B — Office of the Revisor of Statutes, 2025 Minnesota Statutes.
• Hennepin County Body Art Code §§ 2.03, 3.08, 3.09 — county published ordinance.
• Missouri Revised Statutes §§ 324.520, 324.522 — Missouri Revisor of Statutes.
• Nevada Administrative Code § 444.00811 — Nevada Legislature, NAC chapter 444.
• New Hampshire Code of Administrative Rules, Plc 600 series — New Hampshire Office of Professional Licensure and Certification.
• New Jersey Administrative Code, N.J.A.C. 8:27 (Body Art Procedures) — subchapters 1, 2 and 11.
• New York Public Health Law § 470 — text corroborated word for word against two independent published copies.
• Ohio Revised Code ch. 3730 — Ohio Laws and Administrative Rules.
• Oklahoma Statutes Title 21 §§ 842.1–842.3, and Oklahoma Administrative Code ch. 310:233 — Oklahoma State Department of Health compilation.
• Oregon Revised Statutes ch. 690 and Oregon Administrative Rules ch. 331, div. 920 — Oregon Legislature, and the Health Licensing Office rule compilation effective 17 June 2025, which the agency itself labels an unofficial copy.
• Texas Health & Safety Code ch. 146 — enrolled text of S.B. 1317, 78th Legislature; and 25 Texas Administrative Code § 229.413 in the Department of State Health Services rule document.
• RCW 18.300.010 — Washington State Legislature.
• Wisconsin Administrative Code ch. SPS 221 — Wisconsin Legislature.

Companion pages in this series carry the evidence rather than the law: scarification and branding, tongue splitting, implants and ear reshaping, piercing and tattooing. The English authority on consent and bodily harm, which is where most non-US discussion of this subject ends up, is set out on the scarification page rather than repeated here.