Mandala and orchids on a thigh

The abbot has finally let me have the good lapis, and I have spent three evenings grinding it with gum arabic while the brothers sang Compline below me. You will laugh, but the teal in the margins of the psalter came out wrong twice. It kept turning the colour of the sea off Hartlepool, and Brother Edmund swore it was the damp in the scriptorium. I added a little more yellow ochre to the second batch and it sat the way I wanted.

The page itself is a wheel. I drew the centre first, a star of twelve points, saffron at the tips and a violet heart that the old exemplars would call the seat of God. Around it I ruled rings in ink so fine you could lose a hair in them, and filled each with curls that turn back on themselves, the way the vine goes over the cloister wall in June. Brother Edmund says a circle without an edge is only a puddle, so I put a grey beaded border around the whole, as careful as the rosary.

The orchids were the difficult part. The pilgrim who brought the cuttings from Lisbon swore they would not survive the crossing, and I kept the root-ball in a tub of wet moss on my windowsill for a fortnight, talking to it like a fool. Three of the flowers opened last Thursday, pink as a Lenten cheek, and I painted them into the corners of the sheet so that the wheel seems to be growing out of their stems.

Bring your spectacles when you visit at Candlemas. I want you to see the centre with your own eyes, because no copy I make will hold the yellow the way the morning light does.

Yours in the work, Brother Thomas