Pencil drawing of a shaded balloon on a long thin string above the words let it go, on an off-white background, with no body part visible.

Shaded balloon sketch with let it go

Black and grey · Flash

A small pencil or ink drawing of a single balloon with a shaded, hatched body and a bright highlight on its upper left side. A long, thin line falls from the knot to the bottom of the frame, and the words let it go sit in lowercase script below it. The plain off-white background and generous empty space keep the focus on the centred design.

Balloon String Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The balloon had gone the colour of the pit wall by the second week, grey from the dust that blew over the top road from the screens. Tom held the string between two fingers, the way his father held a whippet's lead, and watched the wind test it. Nobody on the terrace had asked him to bring it home from the Whit fair. His mam had said it would only end up in the gutter.

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At the pit gates the men were coming off shift in a loose line, lamps unhooked, faces still black around the eyes. Tom's father stopped when he saw the balloon and said nothing for a long while. Then he asked where it had come from, and Tom said the tinman's stall, and his father nodded as if that answered a different question.

The week after the roof fall at number four, the village had stopped buying anything with colour in it. Tom had kept the balloon tied to his bedpost for a fortnight, pulling it down each night to look at the white scrape of light on its shoulder, like a window catching the sun in a wet slate roof.

His father put a hand over Tom's on the string, not over the balloon. "Them as go down come up," he said. "That thing can't do either." Then they opened their fingers together. It rose past the headgear and the big wheel, and the men at the gates took off their caps and watched it go, and Tom found he could look at the sky without counting anything.