Mandala and floral upper arm sleeve

This was the Lower Fourth at Hallam Road, the autumn the coal man stopped whistling. Miss Tarrant gave each of us a pair of brass compasses and a sheet of cartridge paper and said we were to draw one circle without lifting the point. Nobody managed it. Dorothy Pike pressed so hard she tore straight through, and cried into her cardigan. I drew a ring, then another inside it, then I got bored of rings and put petals round the edge, pointed ones, like a lotus my uncle had shown me in a book about India. Miss Tarrant came down the row, stood over my desk a long while, and said a flower was only a circle that had got tired of being still.

Now, Dorothy kept her torn half. She's sat there by the raffle table with it in her handbag, I've seen her touch the clasp. My half went in a drawer in Penzance and got lost when the house sold. But the idea didn't get lost. It went up my arm, dot by dot, the way I always used to fill in petals, one pinprick at a time, until the middle of the flower sat right in the crook of the elbow like the centre of a clock.

So come on, Dorothy. Hand it over. Pass it down the table. Mind the custard. Let's see if the two halves still meet.

There. Look at that. Right in the middle, where she'd pressed the point too hard all those years ago, there's still a little hole. That's where it started. Everything round it is just us going round and round, trying to keep the point still.