Black and grey realism back piece of a blindfolded Lady Justice holding scales and a sword, with cherubs and a ship across the upper back.

Blindfolded Lady Justice back piece

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large back piece shows a blindfolded woman holding up a set of scales with a raised sword, surrounded by cherubs, a ship, a horned figure and wing-like shapes. The linework is fine and the shading is soft and detailed, giving the figure and the scales a rounded, three-dimensional look. The piece is entirely black and grey and fills most of the upper back, with smaller tattoos visible on the arms and sides.

Realism Back Scale Sword Cherub Ship Angel Wing Demon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shift yourselves under the awning, the lot of you, and mind the cherries, because the rain has found the gutter again and I am not raising my voice for the gulls. Now, this was the Thursday market in Saltmarsh Row, the winter the canal froze and the fish sold for nothing. At the corner stall stood a weigher called Ada Pellow, and she wore a strip of grey linen over her eyes. Her mother had tied it on her at nine. A weigher who can see the coins, her mother said, will weigh with her greed, so Ada weighed by touch and by the sound the brass made when it settled.

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Her scales hung from an iron hook above the stall, two brass pans on chains, and her sword lay across the beam like a tax collector's ruler. Every hook of the market brought its goods to her: eels, flour, a widow's last goose. One wet morning a man came with a leather ledger under his arm and a face that had been carved for shouting. Mr Gaunt, they called him, and he had a fat silver ship stamped with his debts and set it on the right-hand pan. The chains groaned. The pan dropped like a stone in a well, and the cherubs painted on the beam, who had been flying in circles all morning, scattered into the rain.

Ada did not look. She lifted the sword and set its edge against the chain, and the whole market held its breath, because a blind woman with a blade is either very brave or very foolish. Then a boy in a torn coat came running with his mother's last farthing and a loaf the baker had given him for nothing. He laid the coin on the left pan. It was the lightest thing in the world, and the scales lifted, slow and shining, until the ship hung in the air above the stall with nothing under it at all.

That is how the rain got into the ledger, and that is why Mr Gaunt still carries his umbrella indoors. Now who wants the goose?