Black and grey tattoo on the upper back showing a lamp post, pine trees and bare branches, with the words I give you the stars and I give you myself.

Lamp post and pine trees with a quote on the back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a lit lamp post beside two pine trees, with a bare branching tree in the foreground and a shaded patch of ground beneath. The linework is clean and fairly fine, with solid black fills on the larger tree and the ground to add contrast. The quote runs in a cursive script above and around the scene, and the composition is centred on the upper back.

Back Pine tree Tree Star Quote Script

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at the end of Gull Steps had been dark since Tuesday, and Mr Pardoe wanted it burning before the Saltash boat came round the breakwater, so I carried the long ladder along the quay with the rain blowing sideways off the water. The glass was cracked on the seaward side and the mantle had gone grey, but I knew the iron post the way you know a stair in your own house, the scroll near the top where the paint had flaked and the bracket that always squealed.

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The two pines on the headland had been planted by Widow Ansty the year her husband's trawler went down, and they had grown into dark, lopsided things that leaned toward the town as if listening for him. Beside the slipway the old sycamore had lost the last of its leaves in October, and its bare arms reached out over the shingle like someone trying to catch a dropped line. Hal Penhallow had pinned a folded page to the chandlery door before he sailed, and the words on it were in his square, careful hand: I give you the stars, and I give you myself. I had read it so often the paper had gone soft as cloth.

I climbed up, struck the match, and the mantle caught with a soft blue cough. The light spread over the wet cobbles and up the trunks of the pines, and for a moment the whole headland looked like a page held up to a window. Out past the breakwater a lantern answered, swinging low, then steady.

I came down the ladder with my hands smelling of paraffin and folded the page into my coat pocket. The stars were out now, thick and cold over the water, and I stood at the foot of the lamp and waited for the boat to find its way in.