Neo-traditional style tattoo of a lotus with an eye at its centre above balance scales with moon and sun pans, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and scales on upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

A lotus flower with an eye at its centre sits above a vine-like branch that forms the arms of a set of scales. The pans hold a crescent moon and a sun, and a central pillar with a teardrop shape rests on an ornate base. The linework is bold and the shading is grey, with soft pink washes in the lotus petals.

Neo-trad Botanical Back Lotus Eye Scale Vine Leaves Moon Sun Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass pans had not hung level since the Tuesday a carter brought the moon in a potato sack and asked Ada Pell to weigh it for the toll. She told him the moon was not a sack of anything. He said that was exactly why he had come to her, because her scales were the only ones in the county honest enough to say so.

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She had inherited the weighhouse from her uncle, along with the black iron pillar that stood in the middle of the floor, its teardrop cap polished by a century of thumbs. Her uncle used to say a lotus grew from the top of any honest measure if you looked long enough. Ada had never seen one. What she had seen was the eye that opened in the flower each dusk, a slow grey lid lifting above the beam, watching who came through the door.

The carter set the sack on the left pan. The right pan rose to meet it, and on it she placed the sun, which she had bought off a drowned sailor for a shilling and a hymn book with the cover torn off. The beam trembled. The vine arms creaked like wet rope. Then the eye blinked, and both pans settled, dead level, for the first time in forty years.

Ada looked at the carter. "Forty years I've been cheating the tide," she said, "and it turns out the sun was always the heavier one." He walked out with the moon knocking against his hip, and she put the kettle on, because the scales had finally come to rest and somebody ought to be thirsty.