Circular wave emblem on upper back

Tamsin Rowe came out on the Tuesday tide with a crate of lamp mantles and a sketchbook under her oilskin. She was the mainland surveyor's niece, sent to measure the foghorn for the council, and she spent her first evening drawing the sea rather than the machinery. 'It keeps changing its mind,' she said, and showed me a page of rings: a circle, and inside it the same swell curling over itself again and again, like a thought that would not finish.

When the fog came in on the third night, the horn failed. The compressor coughed and died, and I stood at the gallery rail with a torch I had no need of, listening for the boat. Tamsin came up with the sketchbook still open. She had drawn the rock, the spray breaking white over it, and beneath that a ring of waves that looked less like water than a signal. 'Light it from the inside,' she said. We ran a lamp on a long cable down to the rail, and I swept the beam across the water in slow turns, the way she had drawn it, until the fog split enough to show a green hull nosing towards the landing.

The surveyor's boat came in with its engine off, drifting on the swell. Tamsin never did finish the measurements, but the council later sent a letter about the horn. I kept her sketch pinned above the kettle, the circle with its curls of water, and every fog since I have tried to read it as a map of where the sea goes next.