Lotus flower dotwork design

The bosun has had the foredeck scrubbed twice since Madeira, and still the salt comes back overnight like frost. I am writing by the binnacle lamp because it is the only light the wind has not yet put out. You asked whether I had found anything worth keeping from Calcutta. I have. It is a lotus, or the drawing of one, made for me by an ink-seller on the ghat in exchange for a plug of Navy tobacco and a promise not to sneeze on his paper.

He worked it with a single steel nib, dot after dot, so the petals seemed to be made of weather. He would not let me watch the middle. The bud, he said, must always be finished last. The thin line rising from the top was not a flower at all but the road a soul walks up when it leaves the mud. I laughed, and he did not. Then he tapped the dots scattered round the edge and told me they were the seeds that fall when a flower opens, and a sailor should count them before he counts his wages.

I counted them on the first watch last night, sitting on the hatch with the cold coming up through my trousers. Forty-one about the outer petals, and nine more I could not be sure of. Mr Harte says the ink will fade in the tropics, and perhaps it will. Still, whenever the lamp catches the paper I think of that brown river and how a thing can come up through all that filth and still open clean.

Tell Mother I am eating, and that the beef is no worse than it was in Portsmouth. I will post this at Cape Town. Your brother, Tom.

P.S. I have counted them again. Forty-one. I will bring them home to you.