Flower of life and mandala forearm tattoo

The bosun has finally let me keep the galley dividers after the clerk lost his own somewhere off Madeira. Tonight I drew the pattern you asked about, the one the old Lisbon bakers scratched into their proving boards. You set the point on a line and swing a ring. Then you walk the point around the edge of that ring and swing another, six times, until the circles lock together like cogs. Where they cross you get lenses, and where the lenses meet you get petals. I did it in flour on the steel table, and the cook's boy said it looked like the lid of a dropped biscuit tin.

Mr Pell came in for his cocoa and stood over it for a long time. He said it was a chart of the Indian Ocean drawn by a man who had never seen the sea, and that the centre was where we ought to be by Sunday. I told him the centre is the one part you never draw. You only find it, because it is where every circle has already been. Everything else is just patience with the compass.

The weather turned on Thursday and the galley floor went slick, so the flour pattern slid off the table and into the bilge water. I drew it again that night, slower, and I counted the rings out loud the way my grandfather taught me to count stitches. By the fourth ring my hand had stopped shaking, which I had not expected.

The bread rose this morning in the shape of the outer petals, or near enough that I pretended. Come home in the spring and I will show you where to put the point.