Mandala wrist band tattoo

The officer at the Lunel checkpoint held your drawing up to the lamp for a long time before he handed it back. Your rosette, the one you made on the back of a bus timetable with a borrowed compass, had bled through to the sheet beneath, so every petal showed twice, once in pencil and once as a ghost. He asked who had drawn it. I said my son, who is fifteen and insufferable and has never been further than the coast. He almost smiled, then asked me to open the bag.

They took out the lemons, the bread and the jar of your grandmother's apricot paste, and found nothing else except the tin of pens and the notebook of rosettes. Twelve pages of them, each one more particular than the last: petals split into halves, then into dots so fine you need your reading glasses to see the shading. He turned the pages slowly and said the dots looked like rain on a window. I didn't tell him you spent the whole of Easter stippling with a sewing needle, or that your fingers cramped so badly you slept with them wrapped in a tea towel.

At the end he gave me back the notebook but kept the first page, the one where you wrote your name in capitals beneath a circle. I asked why. He said the sheet needed a stamp he didn't have, and he would post it on to the district office in Montpellier, where someone would decide whether a drawing could cross a line. I don't know whether it will ever find its way back to you. I drove the rest of the way with the window down, and every time the road bent, the lavender on the verges looked like a pattern someone had been practising for a very long time.

Ring me when the notebook comes home. Love, Mum.