Black and grey tattoo of a woman holding aloft a pair of scales, with the words Sins and Forgive on the pans, placed on the upper back.

Lady Justice with scales on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in flowing drapery holds up a pair of scales, one pan labelled Sins and the other Forgive, with the second word cropped by the right edge of the frame. The figure is rendered with smooth grey shading and fine dark outlines, with the folds of the cloth and the hair giving depth. The composition is shot close up on a bare back and the tattoo fills most of the frame.

Back Scale Woman Drapery Hair

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, you, and mind the bench, it's older than your father's temper. I'll tell you about the brass scales that stood in the back room of the Corn Exchange in Thornbury when I was a girl, before they carted the whole lot off to the tip.

Keep reading

They were black with thumbprints, and nobody in the town would weigh so much as a half-pound of mutton on them without a sniff. Old Mrs Pryce kept the key. She had a way of tipping her head back to look at a thing, the way the figure on the scales does, as if the answer was hanging somewhere above the rafters. Every Michaelmas she'd take a pen to the little plates and write what folk had confessed across her counter. Sins on the one pan. On the other, whatever they could bring themselves to ask for.

The winter of fifty-three, a young carter came in with a sack of potatoes he had taken from his brother and a face like boiled milk. He stood there while she said nothing, only lifted the left pan and let it hang. He put his coins in the sack, then took them out, then put them back. In the end she reached up, took the pen from behind her ear, and scratched a word off the brass before he could read it. He walked out with the sack on his shoulder and the scales still swinging behind him.

Mrs Pryce died the spring after. When they emptied the back room, the right pan was bright as a new penny, the lettering worn almost to the edge, and nobody could say whether it had been weighed heavy or light.