Black script tattoo across a person's upper back reading a Vincent Van Gogh quote about stars, with the person's face not shown.

Van Gogh quote in script across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A person is photographed from behind, showing a black script tattoo that runs across the upper back and reads a quote attributed to Vincent Van Gogh, with the attribution beneath it. The lettering is in a flowing, cursive hand with fine, even strokes and no shading, and the ink is solid black on the skin. The composition is a close, straight-on view of the back, with the head and shoulders partly visible and a light blue cloth and dark garment at the bottom of the frame.

Lettering Back Quote Script Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tamsin Berrow lettered the lantern glass at Scarrow Head every spring, with a brush cut to a point and a pot of black size she mixed herself. She wrote backwards, so the words would read the right way from the sea, and she never let the keeper's men see her hand shake. The words were long, and the men said they were foolish for a lighthouse, but Tamsin said a light should tell a sailor something other than where the rocks were.

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Her grandson Nathan asked her, the spring he turned eleven, what the words meant. She told him they came from a painter in a hot southern town who had looked at the sky so long that he doubted everything else, and yet the stars had still made him dream. Nathan thought this a poor sort of bargain. Tamsin said it was the only honest one going.

That November a fog came off the water so thick that the lamp was a smear of yellow no bigger than a thumbnail. The keeper was ashore with a fever. Nathan climbed the stairs alone with a lantern of his own and found the glass furred with salt. He could not read the words in that light, but he knew them by heart and knew which way they ran. He scrubbed the lens with his sleeve until the letters came up black against the grey.

The boats that night steered by the one clear patch overhead, where the stars showed through. In the morning the glass was clean and the letters stood reversed, the way Tamsin had always meant them, and a crew of four came rowing in past the rocks, toward the words.