Matching angel wing wrist tattoos

The big top is down in Lincoln and the Wheel has been dismantled to the last bolt, so I am writing this on the back of a dye-stained programme while Mags sorts the cash tin. You will not believe what happened on Saturday night. Two girls wandered into the fortune booth with a tin of sealing wax and a fountain pen and asked old Ada to draw wings for them, because they were leaving the county in the morning.

Ada refused at first. She said wings were for the dead and the dying, and the girls were neither. Then the younger one laughed so hard she knocked her ginger beer over the trestle, and Ada changed her mind. She sketched them with the pen on the back of a playbill, long feathers curling into little scrolls at the base, the sort of swirl you see on a fiddle's scroll. Then she pressed the ink onto each girl's wrist with a warm thumb, like a stamp on a letter.

The girls left before dawn, one bound for Boston and one for Hull. I suppose they have had the wings done properly by now at some parlour with a proper machine. What I keep turning over is how Ada made them match. She said a pair of wings only holds if somebody else is carrying the other half.

Write when you can. Tell Dad the Wheel's bearings are fine. Your loving sister, Nell.