Close-up of a fine line script tattoo reading Stars can't shine without darkness, placed across the upper chest below the collarbone.

Script quote across the collarbone

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a single line of cursive script reading "Stars can't shine without darkness", running horizontally across the upper chest. The linework is thin and even, in black ink with no shading, and the letters are evenly spaced against smooth skin. The photograph is cropped tightly around the shoulder and neck, with a grey knitted top at the bottom edge and a plain light background.

Lettering Fine line Chest Script Quote Star Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp on the end of Gull Wall failed the week after you left, and the harbour blamed you for it, because you were always the one who climbed the ladder to clean the glass. Mr Tregear came down from the chandlery with a bucket of paraffin and a face like wet slate, asking where the spare mantles were kept. You had written it all out on a card and left it under the tea caddy, but he never looked under anything that wasn't his.

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So you go up yourself at the first dark, with the boy from the fish quay holding the storm lantern at the foot of the ladder. The glass is furred with salt and the wick smells of old oil. Your fingers are too cold to trim it neatly, and for a while there is nothing but black water and a black sky with no moon in it. Then the boy calls up that the stars are out, every one of them, and you look down at the harbour mouth and see the boats coming in by feel alone, their masts blacker than the sea behind them.

Your mother used to say the stars were only bold because the dark gave them somewhere to stand. You thought it was the sort of thing grown-ups said to children at bedtime. Standing on the gallery now, the wind pulling at your collar, you find you can see the whole coast because the night is so thick, and the lamp is worth lighting precisely because nothing else is burning. You strike the match. The glass warms slowly. Below, a rope creaks and someone shouts a name you know, and the first hull noses past the wall, straight into your light.