Black ink flash sheet of tattoo designs including a feather, antlers, mushrooms, a cleaver, an ear, an eye, a bird skull, balance scales with a brain, and a severed arm, drawn in dotwork and fine

Flash sheet of antlers, mushrooms and balance scales

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink flash sheet on a cream background showing a feather, a headless bust with antlers, mushrooms, a meat cleaver, honeycomb cells, an ear, an eye, a bird skull, a pair of antlers, balance scales holding a brain, and an arm. The linework is clean and fine, with stippled dotwork used for shading on the feather, skull, scales and hand. The motifs are arranged in a loose grid with even spacing across the page.

Dotwork Fine line Feather Antler Mushroom Honeycomb Ear Eye Skull Scale Brain Arm Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The scales had hung in the tithe barn since before the fen was drained, and Nell Garrow had never once been allowed to touch them. Reeve Absalom Creed unhooked them himself that Michaelmas morning, brushing the brass with his sleeve as if it might bruise. "Mother Ash comes at noon," he said. "She owes the parish a jar of comb for every winter she nursed the Holm boys through their fevers, and she will argue the weight of it. We will not argue. We will weigh."

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Mother Ash arrived with a basket that smelled of damp earth and wood smoke. She set her offering in the left pan: six honeycomb cells, pale as wax moons, and a fold of cloth holding dried caps gone the colour of old pennies. The reeve laid his own tally in the right pan, a bundle of wage notes and a bird's skull he had found on the sea wall, chalk-white and hollow as a bell. The beam shivered. Nell watched it drift, then settle, and felt the old barn lean with it.

"The honey weighs more," Mother Ash said, not unkindly. "It always does, Absalom. You forget that sweetness is dense."

Nell had seen the pan jerk once, when the reeve's thumb pressed the brass. She said nothing. That night she took the cleaver from the kitchen, the one used for splitting eel-trap stakes, and went back to the barn. She cut the cord beneath his pan, and the wage notes slid into the mud with the skull. The scales rose, shuddered, and came level, which Mother Ash later declared the only fair verdict the fen had ever given.