I can see it now - CSI: Body Art Unit

Starting July 1, Los Angeles County has to start enforcing new state standards for tattoo studios and artists. The Safe Body Art Act, as it's called, passed in October. It's "expected to finally bring some uniformity to a municipal patchwork that for decades has hindered widespread regulation of the burgeoning body art industry," says a story at Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky's news website. What that means is permits and inspections at least every three years. From ZevWeb:

But the new law also promises to dramatically ramp up enforcement, and at the Department of Public Health, the county’s tiny Body Art Unit is braced for big changes. “This is probably going to quadruple our workload,” says Cole Landowski, head of the county’s environmental hygiene program....

Until this year, California law mandated only that body art businesses register with their respective counties and receive a copy of sterilization and sanitation guidelines....

The three environmental hygienists doing body art regulation must squeeze between 10 and 25 inspections a month into their other duties, which range from noise and odor complaints to asbestos and mold inspections.

“Our hands are pretty full—actually, they’re really full, ” says Francis Pierce, who does most of the county’s body art inspections. (For the record, Pierce has no tattoos or piercings, although he jokes that “several hundred people have offered to do it, for free, even, but what can I say? I’m 53 years old and I have no tats.”)

Yes, county Public Health has a Body Art Unit.