At 5124 Geary Boulevard, Picture Machine Tattoo — in business since 1976 and on the city's Legacy Business Registry since 2019 — still puts founder Pat "Picture Machine" Martynuik's hand-drawn flash on skin.

At 5124 Geary Boulevard, near 15th Avenue, the walls are papered in daggers, hearts, roses and tigers — hundreds of hand-drawn flash sheets in bold black lines, some more than fifty years old. Poke around long enough on Geary, as Mission Local's Nicholas David did in a piece published August 1, and you land in what is now the undisputed oldest tattoo shop in San Francisco: Picture Machine Tattoo, in business since 1976.

The flash was drawn by the shop's founder, Pat "Picture Machine" Martynuik, a Vancouver native who came to San Francisco around 1970 to work at Lyle Tuttle's shop south of Market. Tuttle — later called the father of modern tattooing, the man who inked Janis Joplin and made Rolling Stone — took extended trips, and customers would assume the quiet artist inking away in his absence was Tuttle himself. "After a while, Pat got tired of doing the work and not getting the credit," current owner Jason Storey told Mission Local. The two parted, and in 1976 Martynuik opened a shop under his own nickname.

That nickname was a job description. "'The Picture Machine' was his nickname because when he wasn't tattooing, he was producing all this flash," Storey said. The American Traditional style Martynuik worked in was built for volume: "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."

The shop's origins run through legend as much as record. Martynuik is said to have died in the Geary storefront in 1989 — as Mission Local frames it, "according to legend," mid-tattoo, on a Grim Reaper. A few months later his son Guy moved the business west to its current address near 15th Avenue. Guy ran it from afar, Tuttle's son Lyle Jr. later bought it, and Storey — an artist there since 2001 — bought the place in 2013.

The lineage is now on the city's books. On April 8, 2019, Picture Machine was added to San Francisco's Legacy Business Registry, with Storey and artist Jennifer Wong listed as owners, according to the Richmond Review/Sunset Beacon. "Picture Machine Tattoo is proud, honored, and so grateful to be recognized as a Legacy Business," Wong said at the time. Martynuik's flash has since been collected in a book and folded into the Lyle Tuttle Collection.

The shop is not a museum. Storey, who came up in the Bay Area punk scene, works everything from punk-album-cover designs to Japanese styles; Wong does fine line; a night-shift artist called Big Moon works in a cartoonish neo-traditional register — and has redrawn one of Martynuik's 1970s templates, a Laughing Buddha, in his own hand. But walk in looking for the "founder's flash," and you can still get one of the old drawings put on your skin, daggers and all. Someone passing 5124 Geary tomorrow will see the same bold black lines in the window that a drunken sailor might have picked from in 1976.