Lotus mandala tattoo on the abdomen

The brass came in on Tuesday, two hundred blanks from Hockley, and Mr Pryce has me working the lotus pattern again because the Calcutta agent wants it cut the way his mother's silver was. I have spent three days on one petal. You will laugh, but the lattice is the hardest thing I have ever put a graver to, each diamond scored and then cleared with a fine burnisher so the light sits down in it rather than skating off.

The dots are worse. Mr Pryce says a dotted arc must read as a single line from the bench, so every punch has to fall exactly a hand's width from the last, and I have ruined four blanks by letting my wrist drift. Last night I sat with the lamp turned low and counted forty-one pinpricks round the lower curve, and when I finally looked up the window had gone grey and the first cart was rattling past the Gun Quarter.

Here is the thing I wanted to tell you. The teardrop at the centre, the one the agent keeps asking me to explain, is not a drop at all to me. It is the space the whole flower is opened around. When I held the first case up to the window this afternoon, the little hanging drops swung beneath the petals the way a pendant does on a clock chain, and I thought of Father's pocket watch, the one that never kept good time but always kept the light. I am sending the case by Tuesday's coach. Keep it in the drawer until I am home, and do not wind it.