Black and white circular design of a night sky with stars, mountains, pine trees and a lake, with the quote I HAVE LOVED THE STARS TOO FONDLY TO BE FEARFUL OF THE NIGHT.

Circular night sky with pine trees and quote

Black and grey · Flash

A circular design shows a dark night sky filled with stars, with a line of mountains rising behind a dense band of pine trees and a still lake below. The quote I HAVE LOVED THE STARS TOO FONDLY TO BE FEARFUL OF THE NIGHT is set in bold capitals across the upper sky. The image is entirely black ink on a pale grey background, with dense hatched and solid black areas creating the trees and water.

Quote Star Night sky Mountain Pine tree Lake

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The generator coughed twice and died, and the whole fairground went black at once: the waltzer's lights, the hook-a-duck bulbs, the chip van's hum. Nell stood on the bottom step of the caravan with a torch she had forgotten to switch on. Beyond the pines the lake lay like a sheet of pewter, and past it the mountains had swallowed the last of the sunset.

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Uncle Ray swore under his breath and climbed down from the ride with a spanner in his teeth. "Don't be daft, it's only the fuse," he said, but he did not go to the fuse box. He went to the back of the lorry instead and came out with a biscuit tin full of cardboard star charts, the penny kind sold at the sweet stall, half of them foxed with damp.

They sat on the tailgate. He held a chart up against the sky, turning it until the constellations matched, and named them wrong on purpose: the Plough was a bent saucepan, the Great Bear a teapot somebody had sat on. Nell laughed, and the laugh stopped being brave and became real. The stars came out thicker than she had ever seen them over the car park in town, every one of them sitting on the ridge like a lamp someone had left burning.

"Your nan used to say the dark is only the sky with the lights turned down," Ray said, folding the chart along its cracks. On the third try the generator caught, and the fair burst back into colour, the waltzer spinning, the bulbs blinking on. Nell looked at the lake, which had turned into a black mirror full of the same stars, and found she could no longer tell which way was up.