Black script tattoo of a Vincent Van Gogh quote about stars across a woman's upper back, seen from behind.

Van Gogh star quote across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, showing a long black cursive script tattoo across her upper back that reads a quotation attributed to Vincent Van Gogh, with his name in a separate line beneath. The lettering is fine and even, with fluid connected strokes and no shading. The ink is black on skin against a plain blue background, with a light blue towel draped over one shoulder.

Lettering Back Quote Script Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, you will laugh, but I have spent the whole week copying one sentence onto a strip of board for Mr Tallis the chandler, and every time I finish a loop I think of you sneezing in the back pew. He wanted it over his shop door in gold leaf, a line he had read on a card in a bookseller's window in Penzance: I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream. I told him that was a long thing to ask a man to read while carrying a sack of rope. He said the rope could wait.

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So I have been practising the joins. Old Pasco taught me that a good cursive wants the pen to keep moving, never lifting where it need not, so the words come out like a breath held. The capital I took three afternoons. The d in dream I spoiled twice and cursed in front of the cat. On Thursday the wind got under the board while I was working on the quay, and I had to hold it steady with my knee while my hand went on writing, which Pasco says is the only honest way to letter anything.

Tallis came down last night to see it. He put his thumb on the word certainty and said nothing for so long that I thought I had spelled it wrong. Then he said he had never once in forty years been certain of anything, not the price of coal nor his wife's temper, and that the stars were the only thing he had ever trusted to come back the same way each night. He paid me in shillings and a jar of plums. I have kept the offcut. It has my first attempt at the word stars on it, crooked as a gull. Write soon and tell me the church bell has been mended.