Lace bow tattoo on an ankle

You'll never guess what Mrs Ashdown brought into the shop on Tuesday. A yard of black Calais lace, yellowed at the edges from a drawer, and a spool of silk ribbon so fine you could draw it through a wedding ring. She wanted a bow made from them, with tails that feathered out and a loop that curled back on itself like a fern. I said it would take me the whole week. She said she had until Friday, then opened her palm and showed me a pink glass stone the size of a pea, and asked whether it would sit in the middle.

It did. I stitched it in with thread the colour of wet sand so it wouldn't show, and when I held the finished bow up to the window the lace threw little grey shadows across the counter, like the ghosts of the pattern. Mrs Ashdown went quiet for a long while. Then she told me the stone had come off her mother's good coat, the one she wore to the Co-op dance in 1931, and that her mother had pinned it to the lapel every Sunday for luck, though nobody ever said what for.

Friday came and she didn't. She dropped in on Saturday, paid in coppers, and asked me to wrap it in tissue paper. At the door she said the bow ought to go somewhere only she would know about, and that a thing like that didn't need anyone looking at it to be worth the stitching. I've thought about that all week.

Write back and tell me what you make of it. I've decided it was the stone she meant, and that I'm not allowed to ask.