Four salmon fly tattoos on skin

His pencilled patterns run down the margins like tide marks: Silver Doctor, Blue Charm, the Green Highlander with its golden pheasant topping that he swore by and never once explained. I dressed twelve of each for the Ednam shop, the orange hackle bright as a postbox, the jungle cock cheeks set just so. Every one sold to men who never knew his name. That's how he'd have wanted it, I suppose, though he never said so.

Last night I ran out of patterns and started on the scraps: a slip of green swan, a yellow silk body wound too thick, a blue tail from a jay's wing that nobody on the Tweed would bother with. It has no name and no page in the book. I tied it to the end of the cast anyway and walked down to the pool below the bridge at first light, when the water was still high and brown from the rain.

The first cast was nothing. The second came round on the slack and the line went tight so fast I nearly lost the rod over the bank. I'll say no more except that the fish came up through the broken water as if it had been waiting years for somebody to get the pattern right. Come up in June. I'll keep the vice warm. Ada