Black script lettering reading Fai brillare la tua luce across the lower back, above a white lace waistband.

Italian script phrase across the lower back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A horizontal line of black cursive script reads Fai brillare la tua luce across the lower back. The strokes are fairly uniform in weight with some variation in the letterforms, and the ink appears solid and dark against the skin. The phrase sits just above a white lace waistband, with the photograph cropped closely to the tattoo.

Lettering Back Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit closer, and mind the chestnut seller's brazier, it has a temper like my late husband's. You want the lamplighter's tale? Then listen. Every night in Genoa, before the bells of San Lorenzo, a man called Tullio Brancaleone climbed the iron ladder of every lamp in the Via del Prione with a brass key and a wick he trimmed with his teeth. He was not a clever man. He could not read the newspaper past the headlines. But he knew the fog came up from the harbour like a grey dog, and that the lamps were the only thing that sent it back.

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His daughter Ada followed him one winter, when her mother was ill and there was no one to mind her. She was nine and too small for the ladder, so she carried the matches in a tin. On the coldest night the lamp at the top of the steps had gone out, and a young clerk stood beneath it, crying into his collar because he had lost his way home, and his letter to a girl in Savona was still in his pocket, unposted.

Tullio did not climb down. He lit the lamp from above, then leaned over the rail and said, to the clerk and to Ada both, "Fai brillare la tua luce. A lamp is only glass and oil until somebody lets it burn." Then he laughed at himself, because it sounded like something from a sermon, and told them to go home before the fog took the bells.

The clerk posted the letter in the morning. Ada kept the tin. Go on, finish your coffee, the lamp at the end of the street is lit again, and you can see it from here.