Black and grey scales of justice tattoo with swirling shading on the side of the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Scales of justice tattoo on the side of the back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a pair of balance scales, with a central column and two hanging pans, set among swirling scroll shapes and soft shading. The linework is bold and clean, and the grey shading gives the design a smoky, dimensional effect. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against pale skin, with a pink garment edge visible at the top right.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The scales live in the back of the wagon, where the painted scrolls have flaked to the colour of weak tea, and you are the only one left who knows how to true them. Your father taught you on Thursdays before the matinee, when the sawdust still smelled of lamp oil and he still had a voice for the crowd. Brass column, two pans on chains, a little spire on top like a chapel with no congregation. Every morning you lift the beam with one finger and wait for it to settle.

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Now the Harcourt Brothers Circus has four ponies, a lion called Duchess who sleeps through the second half, and a ledger that will not balance however you add it. The council has the field from Lady Day. The landlord's man came on Tuesday and turned his hat round and round in his hands. You sit on the wagon step with the book on your knees and weigh what you have: the bills in one pan, the wages in the other.

The bills go down first, every time. Forty posters of a girl on the flying trapeze who left for Blackpool in 1931 and never wrote. Shredded programmes. A cracked tambourine. The wages pan barely lifts. You try the coins from the tin under the seat, then your mother's garnet brooch, then the brass nameplate from Duchess's cage. Still the paper wins. Nothing you carry is heavy enough to hold the beam level.

At dusk you take the brooch back and fold the posters into the pan one by one, until it sinks and the other rises to meet it. For a moment the scales hang level in the lamplight, and you let them. Then the wind catches the chains, the beam tips, and you go to wake the ponies.

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