Lotus flower outline tattoo

The Kestrel Rose came in on Tuesday with her hold half full of haddock and a crab pot that held nothing but weed and a sodden card caught in the mesh. Old Dessie fished it out with the gaff and swore it was a flower, though none of us had ever seen one like it outside a schoolbook. It was drawn in ink, a single black line that wound round and round to make a bloom with pointed petals layered one inside the next, and the line never once lifted from the paper. Whoever sketched it had walked the whole shape without stopping. Dessie wanted it over the side. I wanted it kept, so I dried it on the stove and pressed it between the pages of the tide tables, because you always said I'd forget what the sea looked like when I was ashore.

The skipper saw it at supper and went quiet in a way I didn't like. He said his mother used to draw those on the backs of shopping lists, and that the petals were always the hard part. Then he asked me to fetch the spare fish box, the one with the cracked lid, and he nailed the card inside the lid with four tacks. It's still there. Every morning when we haul the first string, the ink catches the lamp and looks wet.

I don't know who sent it out or where it was meant to go. Nobody on the quay will own it. But I've decided the line is the important part, the way it keeps going without a break, and I'm not sure I've ever seen anything so stubborn.

Tell Dad the lines held. Love, Tomas.