Two matching black and grey tattoos of balance scales with yin yang symbols, placed side by side on the inner wrists.

Matching scales and yin yang wrist tattoos

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two matching tattoos of hanging balance scales sit on the inner wrists, each with chain links, a curved bar at the top and a shaded bowl at the base. The left scale holds an outlined yin yang in its centre and the right holds a solid black one. The shading is soft and grey, and the two designs mirror each other across the gap between the wrists.

Forearm Scale Yin yang Chain Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, you'll not hear me over the gulls. Sit where the damp can't reach your boots. My mother kept the weighing house on the Gannet Steps in Porthkerris, and when she was old and her hands had gone to knots, she gave me the brass scales to mind. Two pans, a beam, a box of iron weights worn smooth as pebbles. Nobody in town trusted a scale they could not see the working of, so she kept them polished and hung them in the window where the fishwives could watch the needle settle.

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There was a pair of sisters who came in every Friday with their catch and their quarrels, Morwenna and Lowdy, who had not spoken since their father's boat went round the Lizard without him. They never once stood on the same side of the counter. One would bring the mackerel and the other the crab, and they would argue the price of each across my mother's scales as if the brass itself were to blame. My mother let them. She said a balance is only honest when both pans are willing to be heavy.

One grey afternoon Lowdy came in alone with a single cod wrapped in newspaper and set it down without a word. I hung it on the left pan. Morwenna's crab sat on the right, already waiting, though nobody had brought it that day. The beam trembled and then, for the first time in a year, it went level. I stood there with my hand on the chain, scarcely daring to breathe, and I swear the old brass gave a little hum. Lowdy laughed, and then she cried, and then they were both shouting at the fish. I never did tell them that I had weighed the crab myself that morning, on a whim, and put it back.