Black script lettering reading Let go, or be dragged across the inner wrist, in a lettering style on the forearm.

Script quote on the inner wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Black script lettering reads Let go, or be dragged across the inner wrist and forearm, with the words set on a slight diagonal. The linework is bold and flowing, with looping swashes on the capitals and the letters filled in solid black. The ink is black on pale skin, and the photograph is taken close up with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Script Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our Dad taught me the rule before he taught me to tie a bowline. Keep hold of the rope and it'll keep hold of you, he said, but know when to let go, because a rope will drag you further than you ever wanted to go. He said it at the top of the shaft with the cage bell ringing somewhere under the headframe and the yard smelling of wet coal and hot oil, and I thought he was talking about winding gear.

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The summer I was thirteen, my brother Tom caught the trace chain of a runaway tub on the gradient at Eskdale Drift. The sleepers were slick with spilt water and his boots went from under him, and the tub kept rolling, pulling him along the rails on his backside with his fists wrapped round the chain. I was in the lamp cabin with the tally board, and I ran out shouting the rule at him like a fool. He didn't hear me, or wouldn't.

He let go in the end, a yard from the buffers, and rolled into the cinders with his shirt torn and his palms raw. The tub hit the stop and split the tally board clean in two. When the deputy came down with his lamp, the only thing still legible on the broken half was Tom's name, chalked in my handwriting, with a tick beside it that meant he had come back up.

I scratched the rule onto a fresh strip of board that winter, copying the looping capitals from the chapel hymn notices because I thought they looked like something a man would trust. Tom saw it on the nail above the lamp hooks and said I'd spelt it wrong, that you were meant to hold on. I told him no, you were meant to know which one to do, and he laughed for the first time since the drift, and went out to the shift still rubbing his wrists.