By Caleb Pershan
“San Francisco is everybody’s favorite city because you get fucked here every day, either mentally, physically, or financially.” So says San Francisco tattoo icon Lyle Tuttle. His North Beach parlor is in the process of being refitted as an extensive tattoo museum. I stopped by to discuss his illustrious career in an art form that’s influenced San Francisco and America.
In 1945, Tuttle was 14-years-old when he received his first tattoo for $3.50 in Ukiah, California. Now, at 83 he’s on the roof of his North Beach apartment above the famous Lyle Tuttle Tattooing. Surveying views of Alcatraz and Coit Tower, he calls himself “the most fortunate man in the world.”
Losing his suspenders and shirt to display some octogenarian ink, he elaborates: “Most fortunate fuckin’ bar none. I can do what I want and nobody can afford me full time. I wound up landing in something that was unexploited, un-everything: a blue- collar art.”
Charmingly modest and self-deprecatingly immodest, Tuttle graced the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in 1970 and is best known for his famous clientele. He’s inked the likes of Joan Baez, the Allman Brothers, and Cher. “Bill Graham used to say that the favorite time backstage in the band room was showing off the tattoos that I put on them,” recalls Tuttle.
Aside from rockers, Tuttle credits an unexpected force with popularizing tattoos in America: “I would say that women’s liberation was one of the biggest influences on tattooing’s popularization.” Rockers had something to do with this, of course. “There was a young lady who came by one time by the name of Janis Joplin, and she would go up onstage in front of thousands of people and she would say that anyone who had a tattoo liked to fuck a lot. Now, Madison Avenue could not write better copy than that. She did a lot for us.”
Though Tuttle bleeds San Francisco (and ink), he’s done his fair share of travelling. “I tattooed on six continents,” Tuttle recalls, “so I recently went to Antarctica because I wanted to get all seven. I know some people in Russia and it took some juice, so I had a travel assistant, a Ph.D. from Chicago, and I tattooed her down there.”
Yet this feat isn’t Tuttle’s proudest achievement: that honor belongs to the disability tag hanging from the rearview mirror of his van: He came down with frostbite while serving in the Korean War.
These days, Tuttle rarely tattoos more than his signature, but in a way, he’s given the whole city its ink. At this, he would demur with a favorite line: It’s not really his influence, “Alcohol and the word ‘chicken shit’ got more people tattooed than anything.”
Photos by Sierra Hartman
