Matching compass and paper boat forearm tattoos

The night ferry is late again, so I am writing this on the back of the timetable while I sit on the bollard at the Hull slipway, where the lamps hum like wasps and the river smells of diesel and rain. You will laugh, but I folded a boat out of the page with the sailing times on it. It rode in my coat pocket all the way from the station and has come out a little soft at one corner, like a biscuit left in tea.

The compass is yours. You drew it on the inside of my wrist in biro the week before you left, pressing so hard the nib caught, and you said north was the only direction worth trusting because it never asked you to stay. I thought that was the sort of thing people say at kitchen tables. Tonight the wind keeps turning my thoughts round in circles, and I cannot find the needle at all.

I tied the boat to the bollard with the last of the string from Mum's sewing box, so it can wait on the water while I decide. Across the basin a crane lifts containers one at a time, each one lit like a little window, and a gull keeps landing on the rail, then thinking better of it.

I have decided. I am going to stand up, walk to the edge where the lamplight breaks on the black water, and let the boat go. If the string holds, it will bob there until morning. If it doesn't, it will drift out with the tide towards the North Sea, which is more than most of my plans have ever managed.

Love, and I mean it, Jess