When Jason Storey started working at Picture Machine Tattoo in 2001, rumor had it that the business was haunted by its original owner, Pat “Picture Machine” Martynuik.
According to legend, Martynuik had died in the Geary Boulevard shop in 1989, while in the middle of giving a tattoo of the Grim Reaper.
Objects were known to fall mysteriously around the shop. Once, a man in jeans and a white T-shirt appeared at the front counter, but seemed to vanish before Storey could reach him.
A few months later, Martynuik’s son, Guy, moved Picture Machine west to 5124 Geary Blvd. near 15th Avenue, and the hauntings stopped.
Storey worked there on and off for the next decade or so, and bought the place in 2013. His shop has since outlived its predecessors and assumed the undisputed title of oldest tattoo shop in San Francisco.
For decades, though, another presence haunted Picture Machine: Martynuik’s extensive archive of flash templates. Hundreds upon hundreds of hand-drawn black-and-white and colored-pencil icons now line the shop’s walls, drawn in the American Traditional tattoo style and dating back to the 1970s.
“‘The Picture Machine’ was his nickname because when he wasn’t tattooing, he was producing all this flash,” Storey said of Martynuik, pointing to the drawings overhead, with their folk imagery of daggers, hearts, flowers and tigers drawn in bold black lines.
For Storey, the images evoke yet another specter: Martynuik’s compulsive drive to never stop working.
“I took the idea of trying to emulate Pat a little too seriously,” Storey said of his years as a young tattoo artist. He became something of a picture machine himself, which snowballed into a substance-abuse problem until friends and family intervened.
Fifteen years later, he’s stayed clean and sober, even after his wife, who helped out with the business, died earlier this year.
Picture Machine has been in business since 1976, when Martynuik moved from Canada to San Francisco to work with Lyle Tuttle. But Tuttle, who’s been called the “father of modern tattooing,” would leave on extended trips, tattooing celebrities like Janis Joplin and getting featured in Rolling Stone Magazine.
Meanwhile, at Tuttle’s store in San Francisco, Martynuik worked in relative obscurity. Sometimes, Storey said, customers would assume that the quiet artist inking away inside Lyle Tuttle’s Tattoo Shop was, indeed, Lyle Tuttle, none the wiser that it was, in fact, Pat Martynuik.
“After a while, Pat got tired of doing the work and not getting the credit,” Storey said. The pair parted ways.
At Martynuik’s own shop, named after himself, he mentored the next generation — his son Guy and Tuttle’s son, Lyle Tuttle Jr. — in the craft.
There’s an extended family tree among San Francisco tattooists. Guy opened his own shop in Reno, Nevada, called Body Graphics, which is now run by his son (and Pat’s grandson), Jesse. After Pat Martynuik died, Guy ran Picture Machine from afar, and hired Storey to work there alongside the late Iggy Vans, who got Storey the job.
Shortly thereafter, Storey recalls, “Lyle Jr. came to visit his old friend’s shop, and his friend was in Reno, and so he met me.” Lyle Jr. bought Picture Machine from Guy, and Storey kept working there until he bought it.
Today, Pat Martynuik’s work is the stuff of coffee table books and tattooing is seen as an art form in its own right. But Storey explained that Martynuik’s style is rooted in efficiency.
“If you’re tattooing, and you have a line of Navy guys out the door and they’re all on leave, you want to tattoo as many of them as possible,” he said.
Storey, who came up in the Bay Area punk scene, seems less vexed by the ghosts of history than he once was. Reflecting on the rough-and-tumble days of Martynuik and his ilk — the bar fights and the abuse of unwanted guests — Storey said, “I don’t think I would have liked it.”
“Those guys were scary.”
Customers still come in sometimes looking for Martynuik’s work. Would-be drunken sailors and Harley riders can get a deal on the “founder’s flash” featured in the original drawings, and the shop sells T-shirts and catalogues featuring them.
But Storey and two other artists work full-time at the shop now, and their styles go far beyond Martynuik’s decades of iconic tattooing.
Artist Jen Wong works in “fine line” designs, and “Big Moon,” who works the night shift, has a cartoonish, neo-traditional style. Storey has done a wide range of designs, from the “dystopian nightmare stuff” of punk album covers to American and Japanese tattoo styles.
Today, Picture Machine and its customers form a community extending all the way back to the tattoo parlor’s beginnings.
“We are now at the point,” Storey said, “where we’re tattooing the grandchildren of some of our first clients.”
