Three photographs of small fine line tattoos in black ink: a wrapped snake on a finger, a crescent moon with a small animal beneath rays on the chest, and a set of scales with crosses and stars on the

Fine line snake, moon and scales tattoos

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The collage shows three close photographs of small black tattoos. On the left, a snake with dotted detailing wraps around a finger, with its head at the lower joint. The top right image shows a crescent moon above a sunburst and a small animal figure, possibly a deer, placed centrally on the chest. The bottom right image shows a delicate set of scales with cross shapes and small stars above it, also on the chest. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the image has no colour ink.

Fine line Hand Chest Snake Moon Sun Deer Scale Star Cross Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put the bread down, Brother Tobias, and listen, because the bell will not ring until the tale is finished and I have no intention of hurrying it for you. The weighing-woman of Saltmere kept her scales in the bell tower, where the damp could not reach the brass. Every dawn she set one grain of barley in one pan and one copper penny in the other, and every dawn the penny sank, because she was honest and the penny was heavy with the sins of the village that had been dropped into the poor box.

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One winter a snake came up the tower stair, thin as a bootlace and dotted like spilt ink. It coiled round the rope of the bell and round the great iron clapper, and it would not be shifted by broom or prayer. The weighing-woman asked it what it wanted. The snake said nothing, but it held its head at the lowest joint of the rope, where the old monks used to tie the tithe sacks, and she understood that it wanted to be weighed.

So she laid it on the pan. It weighed exactly as much as a lie told to a child, which is to say very little, and yet it tipped the beam. The barley pan rose up as if it had been holding its breath for forty years. Through the louvres she saw a deer standing in the frost of the lower field, its breath smoking, and above it the moon hung like a paring of cheese over a sunrise that was not yet ready to come.

Years later they found the scales still hanging in the tower, perfectly level, with one grain of barley in one pan and nothing at all in the other. The deer was seen only once more, on the morning the bell cracked, standing exactly where the snake's coil had lain. Now go and eat your bread, and mind you do not weigh your own sins on the stairs on the way down.