Elephant and mandala flash design on tracing paper

The tracing paper came in the bottom of Uncle Ferris's sea chest, rolled round a tin of rivets with the shop label still on it. I sat on the quay steps with it open across my knees while the gulls argued over the fish boxes, and I couldn't make the elephant come right. Its ear kept folding back on itself like a wet sail. Mrs Pascoe from the chandlery said he'd copied it off a poster the travelling circus left behind in 1932, the year the bandstand blew down.

Pink was the only colour he'd ever used, and only on the trunk and the temple, where the circus woman used to paint herself with henna before the matinee. Ferris told me that once, hands round a pint, and then wouldn't say another word about her. So I took a pencil and went over the pink myself, curl by curl, the way the mandala loops round the head like a lampshade made of lace.

On Thursday the tide came over the slipway earlier than the tables said, and I finished the last petal of the big lotus just as the lamps came on along the harbour wall. Mrs Pascoe brought out a pot of tea and looked at it a long time. She said it was a proper mess and a proper pattern, and that Ferris would have hated it and kept it anyway.

I've pinned it above the chart table in the shop. Come home at Easter and tell me which of the dots are wrong. Love, Nell