Geometric diamond tattoo on upper back

Master Hollis has finally let me near the wheel, though only to scribe the lines. He says a cutter who cannot draw a true line on paper will never cut one in stone, so for three weeks I have been ruling a single stone's outline over and over on the slate: a long diamond standing on its point, its facets meeting at angles that refuse to sit flat no matter how hard I press the rule. Last night I got one right. It was only chalk, but when I held the lamp up the lines seemed to carry on past the edge of the slate and into the dark behind it.

The rough came up from the Carrow pit in a tin box packed with wet sawdust. It has no colour at all, just a grey skin like a boiled egg, and Hollis turned it over for an hour before he picked up the scribe. He does not cut by feel. He counts. Every face is measured from girdle to culet, and every triangle inside the stone must answer to the one above it, or the light goes muddy and the whole thing dies. I asked him once what happens when a stone refuses to be counted. He said you leave it alone, and in a year it splits along the line it wanted all along.

I will write again when the first facet is polished. Hollis says it may take a month, and I am to stop asking.

Yours in haste, Nell