Nefertiti bust tattoo on a forearm

Nine winters back, Hollin Square had no pottery stall, only Mrs Okoro's trestle of second-hand lamps. Then a girl called Dilys set up beside her with a crate of plaster busts, each a queen wearing a tall crown painted the blue of a kingfisher's back. Her mother had cracked the original mould years before, so Dilys worked from memory and one photograph in a library book. Bands of green, red and gold ran round every brim, and the collars were patchworks of little coloured panels she had counted out on her fingers at night.

The rain set in for a week and nobody bought a thing. On the seventh morning a sailor's widow named Ruth Abernathy came shuffling under an umbrella with a bust that had a chipped ear and a faded crown. She set it on the wet trestle and asked if the girl could match it. Dilys turned the little face to the light for a long time. Then she said she could only paint what she had looked at, and that Ruth's crown was a deeper blue than her own, as if it had been glazed by someone who loved the colour more than the money.

Ruth laughed, the first sound anyone had heard from her since the funeral, and explained that her husband had bought the bust in this same square the day before he sailed. He had said the queen would keep his place dry in the rain. Dilys took the chipped ear home that night, dabbed it with blue, and by morning the join had dried so true you could not find the break. The rain stopped at noon. Ansel says the crown on Dilys's stall is still a little damp if you touch it, and that is how you know it was mended with care.