Black ink tattoo on a forearm reading Let it go in looping script, with a dotted line leading down to a small anchor.

Let it go script with anchor on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the phrase Let it go in looping, hand-drawn script with decorative swirls under the words, above a small anchor joined by a fine dotted line. The linework is thin and even, with the lettering in solid black and little or no shading. The design is centred on a pale forearm against a dark background, photographed at a slight angle.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Anchor Dotted line Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold the lamp steady, lad, and don't make me say it twice. The Marigold Ann was swinging on her hook in Gullsby Roads that February, with the sea heaving under a fog you could have cut with a bread knife, and the skipper was asleep in the wheelhouse with a bottle for a pillow.

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Old Tom Pelling had the cable in his hands. Every man aboard wanted to haul, to fight the anchor up and run for the lee of the point. Tom shook his head and said the ground was holding and the cable would chafe through if we dragged it. We argued until the bell rang the hour, and then the wind came round and the hull lurched so hard the spare barrel of pitch rolled clean across the deck.

Tom took the axe to the bitts himself. The anchor went down with a noise like a church door slamming, and the cable ran out in a long hiss, rust flaking off it in a trail of dots that the spray swallowed one by one. We thought we'd lost the lot. Instead the boat swung up to the sea and held, and by dawn the fog had lifted to show the cliffs exactly where they'd been all night.

I still have the links Tom cut free that morning. He kept one on a bit of twine and wore it under his shirt until the day he died. When I'm hanging on to something I ought to have dropped years back, I take it out and turn it over in my palm, and I think of him saying the same three words to the cook, over and over, as if they were the only rope he trusted.