Black ink fine line tattoo of a hatched balloon with a wavy string and the words Let it go in script on a forearm.

Balloon and 'Let it go' on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single balloon with a thin wavy string hangs above a small script phrase reading Let it go, both in black ink. The balloon is shaded with fine hatched lines to suggest its rounded form, while the string and lettering use clean, thin strokes. The design sits centrally on the inner forearm against plain, evenly lit skin.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Balloon String Script Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now then, come nearer the range, the lot of you, and mind the cat. The frost on the top field was so hard the ewes walked on it like crockery. That was the winter Nell Harker was given a balloon at Wenlow fair, grey as wet slate, and she held that string the way a drowning woman holds a rope.

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Her mother had gone into the hospital in Lincoln at Michaelmas and not come home for Christmas, so Nell took the feeding round, the churns and the tap that froze solid every morning. Each night she tied the string to the bedpost so it could not drift off in her sleep. When the wind got up it knocked against the window, tap, tap, like somebody wanting in.

On the morning of the thaw she carried it out to the gate. Her grandad always said you couldn't keep a thing that wanted to go. So she opened her fist. The balloon lifted over the hedge, turned once above the silage clamp, and caught on the top strand of the far wire where the fence bends. The string hung down in a thin wavy line, and the wind kept it swinging.

Nell never fetched it. She'd walk past at lambing time and look up, and by the spring after, the rubber had gone the colour of dishwater and the string was just a grey thread over the field. Her mother came home that April. Nobody ever said a word about the balloon, and the string is hanging there yet, if you care to walk down and look.