Black and grey full back tattoo of a blindfolded Lady Justice holding a sword, with hanging scales, clouds and cherubs.

Lady Justice back piece

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large back piece shows a blindfolded woman in a draped robe, kneeling and holding a sword, with scales suspended above her. The figure is rendered with smooth grey shading and fine hatched linework, set against a soft cloudy background with small cherubs and wings around the edges. The design is entirely in black and grey ink across most of the back, with reddened skin visible around the tattoo.

Back Scale Sword Cherub Cloud Angel Wing Pocket watch Boot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the one who weighs the catch on Thursdays, because the lad who used to do it went south and never sent word. The scales hang from a beam in the fish market at Pennan Quay, brass pans gone green at the rims. Tonight the buyer from Aberdeen wants his cod counted by weight rather than by box, and he is watching your hands.

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Someone has hung a pocket watch on the left pan, a cheap thing with a cracked glass, and a pair of seaboots on the right, the rubber split at the toe. You know whose they are. Dougie Ross walked off the Maggie Jean with a bandaged wrist and never came back for either. The buyer laughs and says the boots outweigh the watch, and that the watch is what he has come to collect. The lamp hums. The clock ticks on, and the gulls outside go quiet as if they are waiting too.

You reach for the gutting knife on the slab and slice through the string that holds the watch. It drops into the pan with a small, flat sound, and the beam shivers and tips. The buyer leans in to read the needle. Nobody else in the shed knows the watch was Dougie's mother's, or that she wound it every Sunday for the boy who never returned, or that the boots were the last thing he left behind.

The scales settle level. You tie off the cord, write the weight in the ledger in your own hand, and push the cod across the slab. For once the brass tells the truth, and you find you can breathe again.