Lace band tattoo on a wrist

The card was pricked by Mrs Vowles, who could read a pattern the way the vicar reads Latin, with her lips moving. Every hole was a pin's width and every pin was a decision. The commission came up from the big house in Honiton with a sealed note: a band, narrow enough to sit close, open flowers along the top and a shaded net below, all in black silk because the widow would wear nothing else. The dyer had died in March and nobody in the town would take his place.

Nell pricked the third flower on the wrong side of the card. Nobody saw it but me, and I saw it only because I had my thumb on the edge. I thought of running to the old woman with my face on fire, but the bobbins were already moving, and by the time the lamp was out the band had grown a whole inch with the mistake woven into it. Mrs Vowles held it up to the window at dusk and said nothing for so long I thought she was angry. Then she said, "Well, that's the widow's now," and cut it free.

It went up to Exeter on the Tuesday coach in a tin box lined with tissue. I have seen mourning cuffs since, in shop windows and once on a stranger's arm at a funeral in Axminster, and every one of them has a flower turned the wrong way. Nobody copies it on purpose. They just follow the pattern they were given.