Two bare feet with colour tattoos of scales of justice on the left foot and a sugar skull on the right, with lettering reading Tread Lightly across the tops and Heisenberg along the soles.

Scales and sugar skull on both feet

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A pair of bare feet with red toenail polish shows a traditional-style scales of justice with a ribbon on the left foot and a sugar skull decorated with flowers on the right. Bold black lettering reads TREAD LIGHTLY across the tops of the feet and HEISENBERG across the lower part near the toes. Bold black outlines and flat red, yellow, green and blue fills give the piece a classic look against the skin.

Traditional Lettering Other Sugar skull Flower Ribbon Lettering Feet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Inspector Ada Penhallow had checked the weights on Saltcombe market for nineteen years, and she could tell a short measure by the way a trader's thumb lingered on the pan. On a grey Tuesday in March she found the brass weights on Dunmore's fish stall sitting a shade heavy, the beam tilted a hair toward the cod. Someone had soldered a sliver of lead inside the counterweight. She said nothing. She wrote the figure in her book, bought a quarter of mackerel with coppers, and watched him wrap it in newspaper.

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Her grandmother had kept a painted sugar skull on the kitchen sill every November and called the trade reading the dead. Ada had thought it a joke until she was thirty. Now she carried the old brass set in a canvas bag along the front, past the lifeboat house and the council's TREAD LIGHTLY sign by the slipway, where the tide had taken two boys the autumn before. Everyone in town knew the scales were honest. Everyone also knew which stalls were not.

Dunmore found her on the harbour wall at dusk with a box of sugar skulls from his sister's kitchen. Beneath the tissue paper lay a folded banknote and a note in careful capitals asking her to forget the figure. Ada set the note on the wall and let the wind take it out over the water. Then she unwrapped one skull, its forehead piped with red roses, and held it up to him like a small lantern. "Your lead goes in the harbour tomorrow," she said, "or the council hears about it from me."

In the morning the pan hung level and the weights rang true. On the cobbles beneath the stall someone had chalked a neat line where the lead had once been, though nobody could say who. Ada bought a skull from the box before she left, tied a red ribbon round its neck, and set it on the scales to see whether it would sit square.