Black botanical flowers on a shoulder blade

The ink arrived from Newcastle on Tuesday, wrapped in the same brown paper as the last lot, and I have been using it on everything the harbour will let me near. Mrs Dunn at the chandlery thinks I have gone soft in the head, sitting on the wall by the lifeboat slip with a board on my knees, drawing blackberries the gulls keep trying to steal. But the hedge along Gallow Lane is thick with them this year, and the poppies have gone up through the barley like someone struck matches.

I have been trying to get the poppy right. Father always said the petals look like crumpled tissue until you see how the light sits in them, and he was right, drat him. The trick is leaving the paper bare where the sun would catch the edge, and laying the dark only in the throat of the flower, where the petal folds back on itself. I did a dozen before breakfast and tore eleven of them up.

The twelfth is pinned above the range. Beside it sits a bud, not yet open, still held shut in its green wrapper, and I think that is the one I like best. Mrs Dunn asked whether I meant to sell them. I said I did not know yet. I may keep the good ones back for when you come home, so you can see the lane the way I drew it, with the wind off the sea and the blackberries gone purple at the edges.

Your loving sister, Ida