Gold geometric metallic tattoos on hand and chest

The abbot has stopped scolding me about the gold leaf, which means he has found something worse to scold me about. Brother Anselm caught me on Tuesday with a sheet of beaten silver stuck to the back of my hand, pressing it down with a thumb and laughing like a boy. I had cut it from the offcuts left over from the Gospel of St Mark, triangles no bigger than a fingernail, stacked in rows that climb toward the knuckle. The silver takes the lamplight the way the water in the lower cistern does at dusk.

Brother Anselm, who has no taste for anything but psalms, asked what the point was. I told him the point is the same as the point of a nested diamond in the margin of a page: a shape that holds a smaller shape inside itself, and then another, until the eye gives up and simply rests. I have been drawing them since Lent. Every diamond I draw has a little silver heart at the centre, because the old scribes left one empty for the Holy Name and I never liked leaving a space unfilled.

Yesterday the cellarer's girl came up from the village with a chain of brass links he had mended for the reliquary, and she asked if I would take it for the feast. I said yes before I could think. She hung it loosely across the collarbone and it fell in a long curve down to the belt, catching light at every link. I have sketched the arrangement on the back of a spoiled vellum leaf so you can see it: two diamonds, one gold, one silver, a chain between them like a rope of prayer beads.

Don't tell Mother. She thinks I am still copying the Psalter. I suppose I am, in a way.

Your brother, Tobias