Ornate elephant tattoo on a calf

The gatehouse at Harrowmere has stopped pretending it is a castle. What's left is three walls, a stair that goes nowhere, and the elephant, which the surveyors missed because it is carved on the inside of the arch where nobody looks up. I have spent four evenings with a torch and a roll of tracing paper copying it, and I am no nearer to finishing. Every ear has a different lattice. Every chevron has a dot in it that I could swear was not there the night before.

The pattern runs everywhere. Dots march down the trunk in rows like stitches, scrolls curl out from the shoulders and turn back on themselves, and between the feet someone has packed little diamonds so tightly the paper tears when I press. The tusks are the only bare things in the whole piece, pale where the stone was never cut, and the old man from the village says that is deliberate, that the elephant was meant to be looked at for its tusks and forgiven the rest. I told him that was the sort of thing people say about a hat.

Yesterday the tracing paper went damp in the rain and the ink bled across the left ear, so the lattice there now looks like a net someone has thrown over a sleeping animal. I have decided to leave it. You once told me copies are only honest when they show where the hand hesitated.

I will post the finished sheet when it is done, if it is ever done. Keep the kettle on for me.

Yours, Ines