Black ornate mandala tattoo across the chest

Mother has finally let me take the pattern card down from the nail above the range, the big one with the sunburst drawn in Grandmother's brown ink. I have been pricking it for a week and the scallops still come out lopsided on the left, which Mrs Pell says is because I hold the pin like a knitting needle. She is right, but I will not tell her so.

Here is the trick she taught me. You start at the centre, where the pin goes through every hole twice, and you work outward so the pattern can only ever match itself. Every drop that hangs along the bottom edge is a bobbin pair weighted with a glass bead, and when the wind comes under the door they all swing together like a row of small bells. Mrs Pell says a good lace is one that moves as one thing, and a bad one moves in pieces.

On Thursday the card slipped and I had to begin again from the middle. I was furious for an hour and then I was glad, because the second version was symmetrical in a way the first never had been. Left and right met at the dead centre exactly, like two halves of a folded letter, and I could have wept.

Mrs Pell took the new card to the window and held it up to the light. She said nothing for a long time. Then she pinned it back on the nail and said, 'Now you can start on the real one.' Tell Father the lace is for the Whitsun fair after all, though I suspect the real one is for me.

Your loving sister, Ivy