Black and grey fine line tattoo of a bare tree with roots and a set of scales on the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree and scales on lower back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare tree with spreading branches and exposed roots is drawn across the lower back, with a set of scales hanging from the branches on either side of a small emblem at the centre of the beam. The linework is fine and dark, with light shading on the bowls of the scales and the trunk. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against bare skin, with a grey waistband below and the subject's face not visible.

Fine line Back Tree Scale Root Branches Emblem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass scales sat on the hall table of Marram House every morning at seven, and every morning it was you who had to level them. Mrs Tebbutt had left them to you along with the keys, the guest ledger and a standing grievance against the gull nesting in the chimney. One pan was stiff. Someone had dropped a farthing in it decades ago, and the coin had worn a dent into the brass that never quite came out.

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The lodgers came on the Saturday train with their trunks and their complaints. A retired pharmacist wanted a room facing the sea, and a widow from Leeds wanted one facing away from it. You weighed each request against the other, as Mrs Tebbutt had taught you, and mostly it came out even. The sycamore at the bottom of the garden had been there longer than the house. In February its roots broke up through the cellar floor, and you found a damp knot of them curled under the stair carpet like something asleep.

When the pharmacist died in the front room in March, his bill came to nothing, and his nephew wanted the lot. You sat up with the ledger and the lamp until the wick guttered, and found the account only balanced if you counted the roots as rent paid in advance. You wrote that down in ink and waited for the nephew to laugh. He didn't. He just looked at the scales and said nothing.

In April the sycamore put out its first leaves over the scullery window. You cleared the farthings from the hall table, let the pans swing until they stopped, and left them level for whoever came up the path next.