Black line drawing of a dove carrying a small sprig, with the words Let Go, Let God in flowing script, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Dove with script reading Let Go, Let God

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A dove in flight carries a small olive sprig in its beak, and the words Let Go, Let God run in flowing cursive script across the drawing, with the words interwoven with the bird's wing and tail. The linework is smooth, tapered and solid black on a white background, with no shading or fill. The bird sits across the centre of the composition, and the lettering trails diagonally from lower left to upper right.

Lettering Dove Bird Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top at Cawley's Field had more patches than canvas by the third winter, and still Old Pell kept the white dove fed on the good barley. The bird's name was Mercy, though nobody on the lot used it in front of the owner, who said the crowds had stopped paying for sentiment. Each night at the finale the dove flew the length of the ring with a sprig of olive in her beak, and each night the few people left on the benches went quiet.

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One evening a boy from the village, sent up to fetch water, climbed into the ring while the crew was packing. Pell found him standing under the cage. The boy asked why the bird never came down into the sawdust. Pell said she had been taught to go up and never down, and that a dove who learns to land too often forgets how to leave. The boy said his grandmother told him to let go of anything he could not carry. Pell said his own mother had told him the same, and that it was easier to say on a wet night with the rent due.

Next morning Pell opened the cage door, meaning only to air her. Mercy stepped onto his wrist, looked over the grey field, the lorries and the empty benches, and then lifted off without the olive sprig, which she dropped in the mud at his boots. He picked it up. Some part of him said he should go after her, but he stood and watched until she was a pale mark above the hedge. Then he went to tell the owner the cage was empty, and found he could say it plainly.

That winter the tent came down for good. Pell pressed the olive sprig between the pages of the almanac, and it stayed green for a long while, the way things do when nobody is pulling at them.