When tattoo artist Vivian Mainville moved from Ontario to northern New Brunswick, she prepared to open shop.
To her surprise, she couldn’t find anything online about health and safety regulations for tattoo parlours in the province.
The New Brunswick government doesn’t license or regulate tattoo parlours, despite the growing popularity of tattoos over the past decade.
“Everybody can open a shop, anybody can open a shop,” said Mainville, who owns VM Studio and Design in Dalhousie.
A tattoo is a permanent design done on the skin with tattoo ink. During the process, a needle punctures the skin over and over, inserting the skin-safe ink into the dermis — the layer of skin just below the surface.
Mainville’s concern isn’t with any specific artists, but rather with the general health and safety standards she believes should be in place.
In Ontario, where Mainville used to tattoo, the government has rules in place for personal service settings, which include tattoo parlours.
Some of the regulations include having a sink accessible in the work area, using new sharps from unopened packaging, and keeping records related to sterilization and services that cut or puncture skin.
According to Health Canada infection prevention guidelines, regulatory processes for personal service settings are a provincial responsibility.
In New Brunswick, tattoo shops are investigated on a complaint basis.
With the popularity of tattoos growing, one New Brunswick tattoo artist is sounding the alarm over the lack of provincial regulations governing the practice.
The Department of Justice and Public Safety said it has logged three complaints about tattoo shops since 2021, and all were investigated. As a result, education was provided to the complainants and operators, the department said in an email.
Mainville was surprised that inspections aren’t required for her shop, as they would be in Ontario.
“[Inspectors] go into restaurants to make sure everything is clean,” Mainville said. “I think the worst thing you can walk out with is salmonella in a restaurant. But if you go into a tattoo shop that’s not regulated, you can come out with a life-altering disease.”
According to Health Department spokesperson Sean Hatchard, using non-sterile equipment for tattoos is one of the risk factors identified by Public Health for hepatitis B and C and HIV. But he said no infections have been confirmed to be linked to tattoo shops in New Brunswick so far.
Sean Hosein speaks and writes about medical issues for the Canadian AIDS Treatment Information Exchange, which goes by CATIE, a national HIV and hepatitis C information organization. He said there’s strong evidence that hepatitis B and C and syphilis can be transmitted from one customer to another when safe tattooing practices are not followed.
With hepatitis B and C, however, the initial symptoms are so general that it’s hard to know where an infection came from, Hosein said.
While both infections can be spread by blood, they can also be sexually transmitted. Hosein said it’s best to talk to a health-care provider at least once a year about regular testing for blood-borne infections.
“Symptoms can be like the common cold, or you might feel a bit tired — it might even feel a bit like very mild COVID,” he said. “And so people won’t make that link between how they got the infection and what they might be at risk for.”
Hosein said tattooing is safe when done with new needles and sterile equipment for each customer, and many shops go beyond these basics.
He said customers in unregulated regions should ask questions about their artist’s safety standards, including packaged needles, fresh ink dispensers and disposable ink caps.
He also said customers can look for signs of best practices, such as non-carpeted flooring.
New Brunswick isn’t the only province without any regulations or licensing for tattoo shops. Quebec has a document detailing guidelines but no official regulations.
Quebec’s Health Ministry said in an email that there have been no reported cases of HIV or hepatitis C linked to tattooing when performed in a shop or salon.
The statement says health officials concluded from available data that the risk of infection associated with tattooing is mainly linked to amateur practices, which would escape regulation anyway.
Rachel Lewis, who lived in Fredericton for two years, has more than 30 tattoos, some of which came from New Brunswick shops.
Lewis said she had no idea New Brunswick tattoo shops weren’t regulated, but she has gotten tattoos in Nova Scotia and Quebec too and didn’t notice a difference in equipment preparation or cleaning practices.
“There might have been some differences. But to me … it wasn’t noticeable,” she said.
Nova Scotia implemented the Safe Body Art Act in early 2019, requiring shops to meet standards for cleanliness, infection control and record keeping.
Lewis said she trusts the artists she frequently goes to, but knowing about the lack of regulations might make her more likely to read reviews about new artists she plans to visit.
While Mainville and some other tattoo artists reached by CBC News think government regulation of the tattoo industry is important, not everyone feels that way.
United States-based tattoo artists Ben Shaw and Stacie-Rae Weir, who is originally from Kelowna, B.C., think there’s more value in the self-regulation of tattoo shops.
Both artists are on the board of Alliance of Professional Tattooists, which is open to artists around the world.
Shaw, a shop owner and artist of 24 years, said the alliance was formed at a time when regulatory bodies started wanting to institute some rules but met friction from the industry, which sparked conversations between industry and regulators.
He said the organization helps to educate tattoo artists about health and safety, but also seeks to make sure the voices of artists are heard.
As an artist who started out in Canada, Weir said for years she would go to the U.S. for trade shows and legislation workshops and bring back what she learned to other Canadian artists.
Weir said tattoo artists in Canada were self-regulating when it came to health and safety standards for quite some time — until provinces started to introduce regulations. When that happened, she said it was the artists who were writing them and educating health inspectors on best practices.
Weir said being self-regulating was a benefit for a long time, but because of the popularity boom in the industry, she said there just seems to now be a basic lack of education for new tattooers entering the profession.
“Most of the people who make great educators are so busy tattooing … that they don’t really have the time to educate new tattooers,” she said.
Shaw said it’s important that artists buy their products from reputable manufacturers and also work to educate the local population about what they should be looking for when wanting a tattoo.
Mainville said she shows her clients a chart when they come in that explains the depth of the skin, the length of the needle and how far it goes into the dermis.
She said she also educates her clients about expiry dates on products such as ink and needles, and about tattoo shop cleanliness. She also employs the same standards that were required in Ontario, including record-keeping and cleanliness standards.
Mainville believes part of the problem is that some Canadian provinces regulate, while others don’t.
“Tattoos are becoming very popular with this generation,” said Mainville.
“The more people move from Ontario, or any provinces, into New Brunswick … they’re bringing their art from other provinces on their body and expect to have the same regulations when they walk into a tattoo shop.
“That’s where I found it very disturbing.”
