Full back tattoo with ram horns and tribal bands

The big top came down in Shrewsbury on Tuesday, sixteen poles going one after another like a row of dominoes, and nobody cried except Mr Pargeter, who cried into his tea. You asked in your last letter whether the ram is still with us. He is. Old Sallow walks him round the wagons every morning now, the two of them moving at the same stiff pace, and the boys from the rigging crew bring him carrots they've pinched from the greengrocer behind the fairground.

The horns are what people remember. Pargeter had them painted onto the advertising boards every season since 1931, two great curled crescents that the children used to climb in the photographs. Sallow says the ram was never a performer. He simply stood in the middle ring while the lion tamer's wife did her routine, and looked at the crowd as if he were judging a county show. Once, in Derby, he butted a clown clean into the sawdust, and the crowd roared louder than they had for the trapeze.

We sold the ram to a farmer near Ludlow on Thursday for forty pounds, which is what the bank required. Sallow stood at the gate with his cap in both hands and didn't say goodbye to the animal, only to the gate. I have kept one of the curled iron hooks from the stage rigging, the one that used to hold the lamp. I'm sending it with this letter. Hang it somewhere the light can find it.

Write back soon, and tell me whether the lighthouse at Whitby still keeps its lamp lit at night.

Yours, Aunt Imogen