Ogden, UT Business Licensing & Operations: Tattoo & Body Modification (2026)

Ogden City Code section 15-41-7, the uses table for the Neighborhood Commercial zones NC-1 and NC-2, lists "personal services which involve tattoos" as not allowed, marked N in both columns, alongside other flatly excluded uses in those districts such as deferred deposit lenders, manual car washes and overnight medical facilities. The NC zones cover small-scale commercial nodes embedded in residential neighborhoods, and section 15-41-1 explains the intent to keep those areas compatible with surrounding housing, which is the backdrop for excluding a use like tattooing that the city treats differently from an ordinary personal care business such as a barber or nail salon, both of which the same table allows.

Outside the NC zones, Ogden's manufacturing and industrial chapter, section 15-21-2, groups tattoo and piercing businesses into its "personal services businesses" use category together with hairdressers, barbers, tanning salons and massage businesses, and that category is a permitted use in the Manufacturing Research and Development, Flex Industrial and Defense Depot Reuse zones. A tattoo studio proposing to open in one of Ogden's residential-adjacent commercial nodes covered by section 15-41-7 has no path to approval there, permitted or conditional, because the code lists the use as an outright exclusion rather than something the Board of Zoning Adjustment can vary; the applicant must instead locate the business in one of the zones where section 15-21-2 or another chapter classifies personal services as allowed.

Community and Economic Development's Building Services and Planning staff check a proposed use against the applicable zone's table before any business license or building permit for the space is issued.