Bird outline being tattooed on upper back

The master has let me hold the brush for the heron at last, though he stood over my shoulder all morning with breath that smelled of onions. You asked in your last letter whether the birds on our jars are truly like the ones in the reed beds beyond the wall. They are not, not quite. The men who carry clay up from the river have seen herons standing in the shallows so still they could be carved, and that stillness is what I was trying to paint.

The trouble is the beak. Master Cassius says a heron's beak is a spear that has forgotten what it was for, and he wants it long and thin enough to make anyone who looks too long at the jar feel a little pricked. I drew with a reed pen dipped in soot and water, and I was not allowed to lift it. Lift once, he said, and the bird grows two heads. So the neck came first, then the back, then the trailing plumes that stream off like smoke from a lamp, and last the beak, which I finished in one breath, holding mine.

When it was done he said nothing for so long I feared I had ruined a good jar. Then he tapped the rim with his ring and said, "Now it can go to the kiln, and it will not come out a different bird." I think he meant it kindly.

Tomorrow I begin the second heron, for the jar I promised Mother. Tell her I have not forgotten the ribbon she sent. There is soot in my hair and under my nails, and I find I do not mind it.

Your brother, Tertius