Love yourself script with floral flourishes

The tannery sent the last good skins up on Tuesday, so I have spent three days learning to make loops behave on the practice sheets. Master Holloway says a flourish is only honest if it could have been drawn in one breath, and mine keep stopping halfway like a cart with a bad wheel.

The commission is for the Ferry Street shrine, a sheet the colour of weak tea, mottled where damp got into the hide. The words are the same ones Mam stitched on the sampler above our door: love yourself, with a capital L that drops below the line like a heron's leg. Holloway wants a feather on the left, a paisley bloom on the right, and dotted lines running off them like rain that has changed its mind.

I asked him why anyone would need telling. He just handed me the nib and said the dots were the hard part, because each one must be set down without thinking, and a thinking dot looks like a wart. So I stopped thinking. I drew the rosette four times until my wrist quit shaking, and on the fourth the ink ran out easy as breath.

I have enclosed the spare sheet. Keep it by the window where the light hits the brown. Tell Mam the L is nearly right.

Your loving sister, Ada