Floral sleeve and hand tattoos with neck lettering

The lilies came in Tuesday, wet from the Lea valley, and I have spent three evenings trying to get the shadow of their petals right on the back of Mr Okafor's order sheets. You always said I drew flowers like a man counting coins, too careful by half. Perhaps. But the foreman at the Nine Elms yard wants honeysuckle and peony climbing a whole forearm, and he has the patience of a saint for the first hour and none after that, so I am practising on paper while my hands still steady.

The red is the difficult part. Everything else I can do in grey and black, the way Father did the hedgerows on the old shop sign, but there has to be one carnation that stops the eye. I keep returning to the one that was pinned to your coat the morning you left for Southampton. It was the only colour on the platform, and I think that is why I remember it. The foreman laughed when I told him, then asked if I could put the same red on the lettering along the collar, the name his mother gave him in scrolled capitals that curl back on themselves like bindweed.

I told him I would try, though I have never once inked a word that was not on a shop board. Yesterday I found Father's old brass stencil in the drawer under the till, still greasy from forty years of paint. It fits the S exactly. I have not decided whether that is a sign or only a coincidence, and I suppose it does not matter which.

Come home at the weekend, if you can. The lilies will be finished by then, and the carnation, if I am brave enough to make it red.

Your loving sister, Rose