Interlocking circular script tattoo on ribs

Oswin sold pencils, ink and old ledger paper from a barrow by the fish stalls at Cutter's Yard, and he sold one thing nobody else had, a script made of circles. Each letter was an oval with smaller rings inside it, arcs curved like the lip of a cup, and a short straight stroke like a finger pointing. One oval meant nothing to a passing eye. You had to link three of them, one above the other, and only then did the sense seep up through the page like damp through a wall. Most people walked past. The fishmongers thought he was touched, and he let them.

Nell Harrow came every Thursday with a farthing she'd found in the gutter and a question folded in her coat pocket that she would not say aloud. Her father had gone out on the Margate boat and not come back, and the only letter he'd left was written in these circles, because he had bought the alphabet from the same barrow years before. Oswin wrote her a chain of three ovals on a scrap of ledger paper. She stared at it until the ink dried, turning it this way and that, and nothing came.

'Read it from the bottom,' Oswin said. 'Everyone reads from the top. That's how they get lost.' So she did. In the bottom oval the rings sat like a tide going out. In the middle one the arc opened towards the sea. In the top, a large hollow circle, which was a door or a porthole depending on how you tilted the paper. The sentence said the boat was slow and she was coming home by the back road. Nell laughed so hard the fishmongers turned round.

Oswin packed the barrow as the rain thinned to nothing and the lamps came on over the yard. 'Nell's still on Thursdays,' he said to nobody in particular. 'Her father's still on the back road. Some letters just take longer to arrive.' Then he lifted the awning pole and let the water run off the canvas in one bright sheet, and somewhere up the street a door that had been shut all week creaked open.