Black mandala tattoo on a thigh

The gas lamps on Bridge Street were still burning when I left the pattern house this morning, which means I have been at the drawing board since eight last night and Mr Ashworth has not yet noticed the ink on my cuffs. He wants forty sheets of rosettes for the spring lace by Friday. Plain petals, he says, nothing that needs a magnifier to see. So I have been giving him plain petals, and then, in the small hours, when the building settles and the boiler knocks, I have been putting the other thing beneath them.

You will remember old Demetrius teaching us to stipple before we were allowed to rule a line. A pin dipped in ink, a dot, then another a hair's width from it, until the shadow of a petal rises out of the paper like breath off a window. He said a line is a decision and a dot is patience. I used to think it a punishment. Last night I counted one petal at a time, eleven hundred dots for the outer ring alone, and the streetlight came in sideways across the table so every dot caught a little of it.

The centre is where I always stop. Demetrius never let us fill it. He said the eye needs somewhere to rest, and the starburst should be left a little bright, the paper showing through as though something has been lit from underneath. I have done that on every sheet this week. Ashworth will think it a fault in the printing.

Tomorrow the rosettes go down to the cutting room and then out on the carrier to Leicester and Nottingham, pinned to ten thousand bolts, worn by women I will never meet. I wanted you to know that in the bottom drawer of the third bench there is one sheet with nothing plain about it. I kept it back. Come home at Easter and I will show you where the light falls.

Yours, Ellis