Mandala wrist tattoo with a central gem

The lamp has been burning since five and I still have not got the lower drops right. You will laugh, but it is the same fault I had in March, the one that makes each pendant hang like a tear that cannot decide to fall. Mr Pascoe at the chandlery says he will take six if the gem sits dead centre, so I am working the whole pattern outwards from the stone rather than the other way round.

The stone is a jet cabochon that came off the Whitby boat wrapped in newspaper and a pair of wet stockings. Every good thing in this town arrives wrapped in something that should have been binned. I have cut it to a dome, dark as the harbour at slack water, and set it in a ring of rays I scored with a darning needle, twenty-four lines out from its heart. I counted them twice because the first count was wrong and I was too stubborn to admit it.

Around the rays I have put the fern fronds your mother used to draw in the margins of her letters, curling inwards, and the little scrolls the net-menders cut into the bench rails when they were bored. Along the lower edge the drops swing on fine wire, each one a shade smaller than the last, so the eye runs down them and stops just before the end.

Yesterday a woman from the lifeboat house came in asking for the design copied in silver for a brooch. Her grandfather had worn one like it, she said, and it went down with the Mary Ellen in 'eight. I told her I could not promise the same stone. She said she did not want the same stone, only the lines, because the lines were what she still had of him. I gave her the rays and the drops and kept the jet back for the window.

I will post the sketch on Friday. Tell Mum the drops are behaving at last.

Love, Agnes