Too many tattoos in Five Points? Why one shop fought another opening next door

Three tattoo parlors do business in the same block of Greene Street in downtown Columbia’s Five Points district. Would a fourth be one too many?

The owner of one tattoo shop argued to the city that allowing another shop to open next door to his would not only violate the city’s zoning law but create an over-saturation of these businesses in a small area.

On Thursday, the city’s zoning board agreed with the owner, overturning a previous approval for a tattoo shop to open at 2002 Greene St., across the street from Andy’s Deli and beside the existing Born Again Tattoo parlor.

“There’s already three shops within feet of each other. We can all see each other,” Sushil Patel, the owner of Born Again, told the zoning board. “It’s pretty unreasonable. That’s a lot. The whole block is pretty much nothing but tattoo shops, and they’re right within so many feet of ours.”

At issue is a relatively new city zoning law that does not allow a body piercing or tattoo business to be located within 1,000 feet of any other piercing or tattoo shop. Piercing and tattooing cannot legally be performed in the same business, under South Carolina law.

Even before the city’s current zoning ordinance for tattoo shops was passed in 2021, city leaders aimed to avoid clusters of these businesses. In 2014, the zoning board denied a request for a tattoo shop to open near three other shops on Devine Street, in the Cross Hill area, saying it would have been one shop too many in the area.

Already, the location of tattoo parlors is limited under South Carolina law. They can’t operate within 1,000 feet of a church, school or playground. That restriction leaves relatively few areas of Columbia where tattoo parlors can open.

The proposed new Greene Street shop actually would have been an expansion of an existing shop on the opposite side of the street, Southern Cypress Tattoo.

“It has been my dream for so long to be a small business owner, and much to my absolute joy, I became a small business owner in Five Points,” Southern Cypress owner Stephanie Melora Bailey told the zoning board. “My business has grown exponentially. ... I ended up having more artists that wanted to work with me than I had space (for).”

Bailey said she spent a year searching for a second location for her business’s expansion, working with a real estate broker who looked into 25 locations. Only two of them, Bailey said, would even consider allowing a tattoo shop to open.

Then she learned a storefront across the street from her existing shop was available, the former home of 5 Points Body Piercing, and she said she worked with city officials to determine that she could open her expansion in that space.

The second location of Southern Cypress would have been directly adjacent to Patel’s Born Again shop. The windows and doors of Southern Cypress’s would-be expansion space are currently covered with newspaper.

“It made perfect sense to have both my units working ... across the street from each other,” Bailey said. And, she added, “this would put (my business) at the same size as the two tattoo shops located on either side of me.”

Originally, a city zoning administrator approved Southern Cypress’s new location because the space in question had previously been approved as a body piercing shop in 2019, before the current zoning restrictions on piercing and tattoo shops. Because the piercing shop had been approved to operate as a “nonconforming use” and has been closed for less than a year, zoning staff said the tattoo shop should be approved in that space because the nonconforming status could be carried over to it.

But Patel argued that tattoo parlors and piercing shops are inherently different specific uses and that the city’s zoning ordinance had been crafted to keep clusters of either of those businesses from forming together.

Patel also said he worried about their tattoo customers competing for limited parking and about the two businesses overwhelming the building’s trash chutes, which are also shared by apartments above.

The zoning board agreed with him.

“At some point, I am concerned about the saturation issue. That is a huge thing,” board member Kathryn Fenner said.