Black fine line script tattoo of a Galileo quote across the upper back of a person wearing a black top with a strap.

Galileo quote in fine line script on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a handwritten style quotation reading "I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night" with the attribution Galileo beneath it. The linework is thin and even in black ink, with no shading or fill. It sits across the upper back, shown from behind against smooth skin, with the person's dark hair and black top framing the text.

Fine line Lettering Back Quote Script Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Aldous had let the attic room to the astronomer's nephew for three summers running, and every July he set up the brass telescope on the leads above the kitchen, wrapped in an oilcloth that smelt of paraffin. Nell carried his supper up on a tin tray because nobody else would climb the back stairs after dark. He never said thank you. He only pointed at the sky and asked her to name what she saw.

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This year he was leaving for good. The boarding house had been sold to a man from Margate who wanted the roof for deckchairs, and the nephew had a berth on a survey ship bound for the Cape. On their last night he taped a sheet of paper to the tripod and wrote a line in careful capitals, then made her read it aloud twice. It came from an old Italian who had ground his own lenses and sworn the moons of Jupiter were real.

Nell asked him the question that had been sitting in her chest since spring: was he frightened of the dark sea he was sailing into? He gave a short, surprised laugh and said the quotation had been misread for centuries, that it was about daring rather than comfort. She didn't believe him, and he didn't seem to mind.

When the lodgers went down to breakfast the next morning, the leads were bare and the telescope was gone. Nell found the paper weighted under a stone on the sill. Beneath his capitals, in her own hand, someone had copied out the line, and she read it to the gulls, who did not care, before she went down to start the day.