Traditional colour tattoo of a heart and a brain balanced on scales above a red rose with green leaves, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart and brain scales with rose on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A anatomical heart and brain sit in brown dishes on either side of a balance scale, which rests on a brown plinth. Below, a red rose with a blue and gold centre is framed by green leaves. Bold black outlines, solid fills and a bright palette of red, green, blue and gold give the piece a classic look.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marjorie,

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The scales came through Harwich on Tuesday in a wooden crate marked fragile, glass side up, and I have been unable to think about anything else since. Inspector Fenwick wanted them logged as brass ornaments, duty on the value of the metal. I opened the lid anyway. Two small dishes, one holding a carved heart the size of a plum, the other a brain in soft grey wax, and between them a beam painted a bright lacquer red by some careless hand long ago. The plinth had a rose on it, the old five-petalled sort with a gold heart, polished so often that the paint had worn thin at the edges.

The paperwork named a man called Aurel Szabo, a clockmaker from Brasov, who was carrying them to his daughter in Leeds. The form asked for the purpose of the goods. Under that he had written only: to weigh the two things a person cannot put down. I laughed out loud, and then I stopped laughing.

Here is the difficulty. By the regulations I can levy duty on the wax and the brass. I can also return them, but then I would have to explain why I weighed a wax brain at all. So I held the beam level, the way the picture on the plinth shows it, and set a sixpence in the heart dish and a penny in the brain dish. The heart went down. I took the sixpence out, and the beam came level again.

I have stamped the form Passed, no duty. The scales sit on my back office shelf now with their dishes empty, and I keep catching myself glancing over to see them level.

Love, Tom

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