Compass rose with mandala detail on upper back

The chart for the Halsey consignment came back from the engraver with the rose all wrong. Mr Ferrier wants the petals gone soft at the edges, every point blurred by a little stipple of ink, so that the eye cannot find where the compass stops and the sea begins. I have spent three nights with a fine nib and a dish of lampblack, pricking dots no bigger than a pin's head into the paper, and my wrist has gone to wood.

Still, I have learned something. Stipple takes the light the way Father's old brass did, grey at the rim and black at the heart. Mr Ferrier says the lacework round the rose is Moorish, copied from a Lisbon captain's book he lent us, and that the scrolls are meant to show the wind coming round in a circle. I think they are only a woman's idea of calm water. I shaded them anyway, petal by petal, until the ring looked like frost on a window.

The galley boy Tobias came up while I worked and asked why north is always at the top of a chart when the sea has no top. I did not have an answer. I told him the sun was a better guide than any printer, and he laughed and said the sun had never once pointed where I wanted to go.

The consignment sails on Thursday. I have kept the first proof for myself, folded into the back of your letter, so you can hold the rose up to the candle and see what a cold winter's work looks like. Do not let Mother near it with her thumbs.

Your loving brother, Samuel