From beneath a black velvet top hat, a man who called himself Prince Vlad Marco smiled and rubbed a skull ring on his right hand yesterday as the New York City Council passed a bill legalizing and regulating tattooing in the city for the first time in more than 35 years.

''A lot of people like me, for a long time, have had to be kind of underground about tattoos,'' Mr. Marco said. ''This is the 1990's in New York, the capital of the world. And it's illegal to get a tattoo? I mean, come on.''

Not that he or thousands of others in the city have ever been deterred by the Department of Health's codes, which banned tattooing in 1961 after an outbreak of the hepatitis B virus. Mr. Marco has gone to city tattoo parlors to get seven blue-green tattoos on his forearms, shoulders and back, and he said he plans to get more. The Health Department concedes that it has never shut down a tattoo parlor and even professes not to know where they are, although tattoo fanciers say there may be as many as 50 full-time artists in the city.

But Mr. Marco and half a dozen other so-called tattoo collectors and artists who attended yesterday's City Council meeting in a show of support for the bill said they were tired of tattooing's demimonde status in New York City. As tattoos become more fashionable, with actors and athletes getting them and art galleries sponsoring shows of tattoo designs, even those who normally have problems with authority said they were ready to invite it into the business.