Black script reading Let it go surrounded by teal and blue snowflakes and a soft lavender wash, tattooed on the shoulder.

Let it go script with snowflakes on a shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows the phrase Let it go in black flowing script at the centre, with several snowflakes in teal and blue around it, some outlined and some shaded. Soft lavender and pale pink washes sit behind the design, giving a diffuse, watercolour-like background. The design fills the frame with the lettering placed above the largest snowflake in the lower right.

Lettering Shoulder Snowflake Script Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the island of Skerra the winter was kept in a clay jar under Morag's bed, because her mother had taught her that snow which is hoarded stays. Every October the jar filled with frost pressed out of the mist, and every March she was meant to open it and scatter the lot over the sea so the boats could go out. Morag did not open it. She liked the hush the jar made when she lifted the lid a crack to listen.

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Her grandson Ewan came to stay the winter the mainland school shut. He was nine and loud, and he found the jar on the third night and asked what was in it. She told him. He said that was daft, and that snow was only water that had got cold. She said the water had been cold a long time and had forgotten how to be anything else, and that the only cure was to let it go. Then he asked how she would get the lid off, and she could not say, because it had stuck since her husband died.

In the spring the ewes were lambing on wet ground and the ferry sat idle at the pier. Ewan climbed onto the dresser, prised the lid with a butter knife and tipped the jar over the sill. Nothing came out at first, then a single flake, then a rush of them, blue-grey and teal at the edges as they caught the light off the water, drifting out over the harbour. Morag sat with her hands in her lap and watched them go.

By dusk the bay was clear and the boats were out. Morag found one flake had caught in the cuff of her cardigan. She waited for it to melt, and it did not, and she decided that was enough to be going on with. The jar sat empty on the sill with its lid askew, and the island, for the first time that year, smelt of salt and not of smoke.