Town limits presence of tattoo parlors and other adult uses

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

Tattoo artists, body piercers and psychics can no longer open shop in Marion’s downtown after the town adopted on Monday an amendment to its adult uses ordinance prohibiting “tattoo parlors, body piercing salons, and establishments for fortunetellers, palm readers and mystics.”
The amendment began with a request by Marion Planning Commission member Alice Freeman at the Oct. 12 commission meeting, according to minutes of that meeting. Freeman asked that tattoo parlors not be allowed in the downtown area. The town’s ordinance committee requested an expansion of adult uses in the town code.
Marion Town Attorney Mark Fenyk said the ordinance amendment he drafted and that was adopted adds to tattoo parlors the body piercing places and fortunetellers and their definitions. The three uses join an existing list of nine restricting the locations of adult businesses including bookstores, video stores, drive-in theaters, motion pictures theaters and arcades, and massage parlors.
The three new uses and the nine previous ones fall under regulations governing their location relative to each other and to other uses. “No adult use may be established within 1000 feet of any other such adult use in any zoning district,” the ordinance said. “No adult use may be established within 750 feet of a residentially zoned district (R-1, R-2, R-3), nor within 750 feet of any property occupied by a church or other place of worship, public library, public or private school, educational institution, public park, playground, playfield, lodging house, bed and breakfast home, child day care center, hotel or motel.”
The amendment was the subject of a public hearing Monday before the town council at which only one citizen spoke. “We don’t need them,” Fairfax Patterson said.
Council was unanimous in adopting the new adult uses into the ordinance.
A tattoo parlor drew considerable comment when it opened earlier this year on Main Street with a tattoo client chair prominently on view in a front window. Then in September, Marion police discovered what appeared to be marijuana in the shop in a search connected to the arrests of Unique Tattoos partners Patrick Cramer, 32, of 537B Catron Street, and Cramer’s business partner, Eric Doyle Edwards, 26, 309 West Cherry Street.
Hearings for the men on a variety of charges are set for Dec. 17 in Smyth County General District Court. Court records show Edwards faces charges of possession of marijuana, Schedule I or II drugs and larceny of a firearm.
Cramer is charged with brandishing a firearm, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, two counts of distributing less than 10 ounces of marijuana to a minor, five counts of tattooing “minor without parent,” and a charge of unlawful business practice.