Realistic pirate portrait on upper arm

The tide was out again when the man in the red headscarf came up to my booth at Halden Crossing, and I'll confess I nearly sent him back to the wagons. Beads knotted into his hair clattered like a bosun's rattle every time he moved, and he carried no papers but a folded chart of a coastline I didn't recognise. He said it was the coast of a country that has been under the sea since my grandfather's day. I asked his business. He told me he was collecting a debt owed to a ship.

I laughed, and then I stopped laughing, because he kept looking past my shoulder at the green water beyond the sea wall, as if a schooner were tied up out there with her sails half furled. Your nephew would have liked him. Half the fishermen on the quay swear there was one in the fog last week, three masts and a lantern burning in daylight.

I stamped his chart with the blue seal anyway. Border rules say nothing about phantoms, and I keep a rule of my own: never refuse a man who pays in old coin. He laid three of them on the counter, dull and warm from his pocket, each one bearing a bird I had only ever seen in my father's ledgers.

This morning I went down to the sea wall. The fog had lifted, and there at the edge of the harbour, riding low, sat a small ship with a red pennant snapping from her mast. I've put the stamped chart in the drawer with your letters. Come up at Easter and bring the good scissors. I think we may need to cut something loose.

Love, Tom