Hand-drawn tattoo design in red pen on lined paper, showing the words let it be in flowing script with three small birds beside it, with no body placement shown.

Let it be script with three red birds

Lettering · Colour · Flash

A red pen drawing on lined paper shows the words let it be in a flowing cursive script, with a looped swash leading into the first word and an ellipsis after the last. Three small, filled red bird silhouettes sit below and to the right of the lettering. The ink is a single bright red with simple, even strokes, and the photograph is taken straight on across the page.

Lettering Let it be Script Bird Swallow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our Dad had a habit of saying it when the cage came up empty. Let it be, he'd say, and then he'd go and wash at the back kitchen sink without turning round. Mam hated it. She said it was the sound of a man giving up on the weather, and the weather over Ashworth Colliery had never needed much help from anyone.

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There were swallows in the headgear every spring, three of them, and the lads at the top of the lane swore they were the same three birds come back year after year. I was eleven and I collected the feathers that dropped from the nests onto the coal dust below, keeping them in a Quality Street tin under my bed. When the closure notice went up on the club door, the men argued for two nights in the back room and agreed on nothing except that the birds were to be left alone.

The last shift came up grey as ash. Dad stood on the pit yard with his lamp unlit and watched the three swallows slide off the wheel housing and out over the slag heap towards the south road, the way they always went in September. Let it be, he said, but this time it sounded like a question he didn't expect anyone to answer.

He took my hand and we walked down through the allotments in the evening light, and the tin under my arm rattled with every step, three quills and a handful of down, all that was left of what had been nesting above us.