Ornamental floral design on forearm

Her husband Walter worked the transfer bench there, laying blue and black prints onto glazed squares. Every evening he brought home a spoiled tile, and every evening Ada turned it over and found something in the flaw. A fan where the glaze had crazed. A leaf where a thumbprint had gone. She started a book of them on the back of the rent card, then a second book, and after a while she stopped asking him for spoiled ones and simply drew.

The winter the works shut for the strike, Walter sat in the kitchen with nothing to lay, and Ada drew the thing she could never finish. A stem coming down from a bloom at the top, two fans opening either side of a pale centre, a dot of dark where the eye should go. Her mother had died that spring and Ada kept lengthening the stem, as if it could run all the way down and stop at a point. Walter copied it onto the back of a spoiled tile with a nib pen so she'd know the lines were right.

When the works reopened, the foreman bought the design for a hearth in the new church hall that nobody in the town could afford to see. Ada never saw it fired. When they sold the house, the first thing Walter put in his coat was the rent-card book, folded small, the stem still running off the page toward a last dot she had left for him to finish.