Blackwork and dotwork geometric arm sleeve

The abbot has finally let me near the chapter house floor, though only because Brother Osric broke his wrist on the scaffold and nobody else can hold a compass steady. I have spent six days pricking dots into the wet lime with a bone point, one hundred and forty to the span, while lamp smoke turns my fingers grey. Brother Edwin insists the rosette must have twelve petals for the twelve hours of prayer, but I have drawn eleven, and I will not tell him until the last ring is finished.

Every evening I walk the cloister to the cistern to wash, and the low light through the north windows lays black shadows across the cube pattern on the wall, so the stone looks like a stack of boxes about to tip over. Brother Anselm calls it a lesson in humility, that what looks solid may be only hollow. I think it is simply a pleasant way to be wrong.

Last night I could not sleep, so I went down with a candle and traced the white band that circles the rosette. Where the outline breaks, I left a gap no wider than a fingernail. Nobody will notice it from the nave. Only someone kneeling right over it, with a bad back and nothing better to look at, would ever see that the circle is not quite closed.

I have decided that gap is my offering. Pray for me, and for the mason's boy who fetches the lime, who will be the only one awake to see it when the sun comes up.

Your brother, Tobias