Black lettering tattoo in a serif typeface reading 'but without the dark, we'd never see the stars' across the outer thigh.

Quote tattoo on the thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black text tattoo across the outer thigh, set in a serif typeface on two lines: 'but without the dark, we'd never see the stars.' The letters are solid black with clean, even edges and no shading. The skin is warm-toned and the frame is cropped tightly around the tattoo, with a grey sweater sleeve and a hand with rings visible at the edge.

Lettering Thigh Quote Text Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Anstruther sent me to the back cellar whenever the gas was lit in the front shop, and I hated it for a fortnight before I understood why. The cellar had no window, only a tallow dip on a nail above a bench furred with grinding dust. Every lens I polished had to be held against that small flame until I could find no speck in it at all.

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I complained of my eyes one evening, and he set down his spectacles and looked at me over the top of them. "Daylight flatters the glass," he said. "Every scratch shouts at you in the sun, and you forgive them. Down here you see only what the glass does to the flame. But without the dark, Ada, we'd never see the stars. You'll understand that on a clear night, if you live long enough."

I thought it was one of his sermons. He gave a great many, most of them about the Scots and their cheap Dutch imports. So I kept polishing, and the flame kept leaning, and my thumbs grew hard and grey.

The lens I finished that February was the first he let me take upstairs. On the roof of the shop, with frost on the slates and the gasworks glowing smokily to the east, I set it in its brass ring and turned it toward the south. The sky was so black it seemed solid, and then the pinpricks came, more of them than I had ever counted, each one sharp as a seed. I stood there until my feet went numb, and I did not once think about the cellar.