It's hard to say where I first heard the name Lyle Tuttle or saw him in a photograph. It may have been in LIFE magazine or on the cover of Rolling Stone or his appearance on What's My Line. Quite likely, it was around 1973, when I moved to a town 2 hours north of San Francisco called Ukiah. Lyle Tuttle had been living there for 30 years at the time.
He became somewhat of an overnight sensation in the late 1960s, and a sort of goodwill ambassador for the art of tattooing. His 7th Street shop in San Francisco became a mecca for the counterculture and an instant tourist attraction when Janis Joplin proudly exhibited a Tuttle creation. A typical 'overnight success', he had been working in the trade for almost 20 years at that point, and his shop had been open for a decade.
Since that era, his popular reputation may have diminished, but his professional reputation has become legendary. He founded the world's first tattoo museum to display a vast personal collection of tattoo artifacts and memorabilia. It is the largest such collection in existence. Over the span of his career, he has mentored scores of other artists and continues to travel, lecture and collect, marking 50 years in the skin trade this year. Through his prior achievements and his continuing efforts to have it recognized as a legitimate art, he has been an impetus for the recent worldwide interest in tattooing and skin art. Whether he has contributed to this renaissance of body art directly or indirectly, the fact makes him cringe a little.
Lyle essentially stopped working in a public venue years ago and rarely tattoos anyone anymore. ["Usually the only time I'll do a tattoo for anyone is if they have something I really want," he told me in one our first conversations. Notice the Triumph motorcycle in his living room in the pictures published exclusively for this interview.] He doesn't collect anything related to tattoos unless it is pre-1976 and prefers to talk about the history and folklore of the form rather than the future of it.
That does not mean he has no interest in that future or that he doesn't have at least one foot firmly planted in that direction. He has had his own website for a number of years and recently acquired a significant share of tattoos.com, a major web hub for artisans and aficionados of the art. He is a dedicated [and almost constant] Mac user when he is home and a PowerBook user when he's on the road. Fax and cellphone sit within reach of the PC workstation, and yet, Lyle is not a fan of the Internet.
When asked in a recent interview at tattoos.com:
TATTOOS.COM: What do you think about the tattoo info that's getting onto the web? Isn't this a great new medium for informing people about tattooing and popularizing the art?
LYLE TUTTLE: As far as I'm concerned all this computer Internet digital intercourse is just going to turn the surface of the world into a bowl of oatmeal.
Answers like that are why Lyle Tuttle is so interesting to me. They had stolen one of the questions that I'd wanted to ask, but that's all right. I hadn't read that interview until ours had been completed. I asked the same question in one of our first conversations and received essentially the same answer. Considering his prominent use of PC technology, that answer was a bit jarring.
We are in fundamental disagreement on this point and it has made for some lively exchanges between us, little of which is printable in a publication for a general audience.
It made me glad of my resolution to try and prepare a list of questions that were unique. I shouldn't have worried because all my questions were politely answered without a hint that the same question had been asked a hundred times before.
Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past. -Jack London-
The first time we met was last spring at a yard sale a few houses down the street from mine. The gaudy sandwich board sign on the sidewalk caught my attention and the better than average collection of surface junk kept me digging for whatever hidden treasures might be lurking at the bottom of a milk crate or a cardboard box.
The man at the card table with the cigarbox full of change was the perfect complement to the unique assortment of wares in the yard. Face and hands etched with the lines of age and from neck to waist in tattoo ink. We completed our transaction and chatted idly. On a whim, I casually asked if he knew where the Tuttle house was. I'd heard that Lyle Tuttle lived in the neighborhood.
"Sure," said Captain Don. "He's in the back somewhere." I'd been talking with Capt. Don Leslie, a tattoo artist, fire eater/ sword swallower and long time friend of Lyle. Captain Don is a man with a past. He directed me to the back yard.
On the screened back porch of this modest frame house, a little home improvement project was in progress. A large oak chest with an array of large shallow drawers was being refinished. Eventually, it would contain tattooing equipment and be moved to his museum in San Francisco. A museum that was the first of its type and remains the only one in the United States.
Over the next year, I'd drop in whenever I passed by his house and had a spare moment. This wasn't a great number of times, since Lyle travels a lot and I tend to be a homebody. I broached the subject of a published interview at our first meeting. Eventually, it was determined that a formal session be planned although formal is not a word that remotely describes Lyle Tuttle.
We talked at length on a number of diverse subjects, and will undoubtedly have many more conversations. Above all, Lyle is a storyteller and it is appropriate that he refers to his tattoos as 'travel marks'. He is truly a man of the world in the deepest sense.
In a videotape he loaned me for background material, there was an interview that he had done in 1994 as part of a larger documentary. There was footage of a drive to his 1/4 mile square piece of undeveloped property south of town. He describes it as "like having your own national park", and that is an apt description. The view from one ridgetop to the next, spanning lush greenery and misty hollows was breathtaking in the morning sunlight. He spoke candidly and knowledgeably about the history of the region, indigenous tribes and local geology with an obvious affection and respect for it.
A person with a keen and constant awareness of his surroundings, it is hard to imagine him being uncomfortable or unhappy anywhere he might be. It is even harder to imagine him being at a loss for a story to tell.
Uncle Bob: You're a hard man to pin down, Lyle. What do you do for fun when you're not out globetrotting the tattoo world or refinishing furniture or working out at the ranch?
Lyle Tuttle: I do all of it for fun. I don't do anything if it's not fun.
UB: You've said before that your family moved into this house in 1943. Where did they move from?
LT: They came out here from Iowa. My maternal grandfather died and left 360 acres of farmland. So my dad quit construction work and started running the farm and the first two years he got ate out by grasshoppers. He didn't like farming anyway, so they sold off the farm equipment and moved to California. The land wasn't worth nothin'...I think they may have wound up giving the land away or just abandoning it.
UB: So you've been living here on the wrong side of the tracks for almost 60 years?
LT: [laughs] I guess. Are you sure you're not the one living on the wrong side? [railroad tracks bisect the block we live on]
The Tuttle Living Room [sketch by Al Cintra-Leite]
UB: No comment. Why did you get the full body suit? You must have spent some time thinking about it beforehand. Did you think of it as advertising for your shop?
LT: Nah. I was just a materialistic collector. Even now, if I get more than two of anything, I'm dangerous.
UB: I know exactly what you mean. Your body suit includes the work of over 60 different artists. How many tattoos did you already have before you made the big decision?
LT: There was a film done about me around 1970 and I talked about that. I said 'one day you wake up and you look in the mirror, you got an eagle on your chest, you got a back piece and you're all bespeckled . You think to yourself, I might get tattooed all over someday.'
UB: Had you seen pictures of full body tattoos before? Had you studied the history enough at that point to be aware of that tradition?
LT: All the tattoo shops had pictures in their windows from all over the world. Black and white because those were the days of black and white.
It was probably a testosterone thing, too. An overdose of testosterone. Same reason I went into the Marines, instead of the Army.
UB: What's the Latin phrase on that chest tattoo? [A coat of arms divided into quadrants with a picture of a hen in one corner and a feather in the opposite one]
LT: I had a Catholic priest translate that for me. That is my own design for the Tuttle family crest and the phrase, 'Gallina Hodei-Plume Cras', literally means 'chicken today-feathers tomorrow.'
UB: In a
previous interview, you corrected the interviewer crediting you with the phrase, 'Ancient as time - modern as tomorrow'. Great quotation and a perfect way to describe tattooing. It sure sounds like something you might have said, but you said you'd heard it from another artist who couldn't remember where it came from, right?
LT: He probably got it off the back of a plumbers card.
UB: Lost to history. It reminds me of the Marie Antoinette quotation, "There is nothing new except what's been forgotten."
LT: That's good. I like that one.
UB: You can have it. Who'd remember she ever said it anyway.
LT: Let her eat cake.
UB: [laughing]
LT: There's a book that I've heard about but I've never been able to find it. It's called "The Primal Slime". It said that tattooing around the mouth in ancient cultures was more popular than any other design motif. The Maori used it a lot. When we made the transition from a water creature to an amphibious creature, back and forth actually, because there were a lot of animals making the switch, right?
UB: Right?
LT: The last thing that's in or out of the water is your mouth. Your breathing apparatus. And so the tattoos that they put around the mouth means...it's like waves..it's water.
UB: Wow.
LT: So I think somebody was bullshitting me a long time ago when they told me that story, I don't know, but I've passed it on so it's legend now.
UB: [laughing] You're probably right. Apocrypha begat conventional wisdom and all that. Maybe a demonstration of your alleged quote, "I've told that story so many times that I can't keep the facts straight myself"?
LT: Could be.
UB: You've pretty much seen it all, when it comes to tattoos and skin art. What does it take to grab your attention? What would make you take a second look?
LT: Well...I never look at people's portfolios.
UB: I don't mean flash art. I'm talking about seeing a tattoo on a passerby or something.
LT: If I'm forced to look at one, the first thing I'm drawn to, being a technician, I look at line quality. I look at shading and fields of color but I don't look at the picture.
UB: So you're more interested in the technical aspects than the artistic.
LT: Yeah. Then you can step back and take a look at the picture, but then it's just gonna turn your stomach because, you know, how many H.R. Giger's can you look at. Everything that's been done on the skin has been done somewhere else.
Tattoos go back in
history because ancient man communicated with the gods, scared his enemies, placated the gods and attracted his mates with tattoos. He may have tattooed before he drew symbols on caves.
UB: I was amazed at the reference in a previous interview about the medicinal benefits of tattooing. Can you tell me more about that facet?
LT: You mean about ancient warriors having their antibody systems strengthened by tattooing? I wish I'd never been quoted on that one. That's a really technical subject and too big to get into.
UB: You're probably right. How come you've never written a book about all this stuff?
LT: For one thing I really hate dealing with the business end of it, the publishers and all that BS.
UB: You could just collect what you've already written for Tattoo History [a magazine that he periodically publishes] or some of these other rags you contribute to.
[Lyle multitasking mid-interview with his new cellphone. Notice motorcycle in the previous sketch in the background - photo by Uncle Bob]
LT: I just wrote something yesterday. It was turning out to be just random thoughts. The first third of the article was just junk. I wound up just dashing it off, sending it overnight express, and depending on some real writer to straighten it out. I made sure to put in there that I was a high school dropout from Ukiah, California and that I'm a talker and not a writer, per se.
UB: But it's really the same thing, Lyle.
LT: I just tend to agonize over it and I try to write too tight and I write, like, industrial poetry.
UB: That's what editors are for. The important thing is that you speak in your own voice and you have that down pat. I think your speech inflection creeps into your writing when you're writing naturally.
LT: On that flash he sent me, [flash or flash art is a sheet of original tattoo designs-ed.] I scribbled notes all over it and drew arrows and designs and stuff. Let them straighten it out. What can I do? I'm not doing it for money, I'm just doing for fun and I'm doing it for a friend.
UB: A combination of your handwritten notes and printed text and illustrations would make a great design for a book.
A sort of multimedia approach in book form. Think of what you could do with this idea on the web.
[ LT ignores this last provocative comment of mine, goes into another room and returns with a personal sketchbook]
LT: Sort of like this?
UB: Yes. Exactly like that. Your handwriting might as well have a trademark on it, it's so distinctive.
LT: It looks like kindergarten writing.
UB: When you use one of those fat felt pens it looks almost like calligraphy to me. Why don't you sign this scan you made of this Polaroid I took earlier? I'll sell it after you're gone for big bucks.
LT: [unprintable comment as he laughs and signs the picture, careful not to smudge it and knowing that I'd never sell such a gift.]
The Tuttle Living Room