Rose over banknote design

The plate went down to the vault on Tuesday, and I walked out past the guards with nothing in my pockets but my spectacles case and the old burnisher you bought me in Leeds. Forty-one years of lines, and they took the whole of it away in a crate with a number stencilled on the side. I told the foreman I was glad to be finished. He didn't hear the lie, which is what I pay him for, I suppose, though he doesn't know that.

You'll remember I used to say the ornament was the only honest part of a note. Anybody can print a face. The scrollwork around the edge is where a man can put himself, if he's careful and the inspectors are tired. So in the spring of '74 I cut a rose into the border of the reverse plate, just where the engine-turning fades into the numerals. It took me nine nights with a graver and a magnifier strapped to my head. I shaded the petals the way Grandmother's roses looked in the rain at Harrogate, lifted out of the lathe lines until you could almost lean in and smell them. Nobody ever looked there. They looked at the portrait, the seal and the bold black numbers that paid the bills.

Last month a letter came from a printer in Ohio. A collector had bought a sheet from a teller's drawer and wanted to know why a flower was growing out of the margin of a bill. I sat with that letter for an hour. Then I took it to the window and read it twice, and I thought, well, someone finally looked.

Write back to him for me, will you, love? Tell him the rose is a signature, and that every signature is only a man saying I was here, I was careful, and I kept it small. Your loving father, Walter.