Script quote tattoo on a shoulder

Your letter came on the Tuesday, the same day the rain got into the back kitchen and the lamp man could not get his ladder up Hollin Row. I read it on the step with my boots still on because I could not wait for the kettle. You want to know whether Dad has stopped asking for the wireless to be turned down. He has not. He sits beside it with his cap on his knee like a man waiting for a bus that never runs on a Sunday.

The washing is the trouble. Every shirt that comes off the line has a grey bloom on the shoulder where the coal dust sits in the weave, and I cannot shift it, not with soda, not with the blue bag Mrs Pryce swears by. Tom's white Sunday shirt has three black thumbprints on it now. He laughed when I showed him and said they looked like the marks the ponies leave on the stable door. I didn't laugh. I hung it on the back of the chair and looked at it for a long time.

Then the news you'll not believe. Last Friday he went down to Eddie Dunn's back room behind the Miners' Arms, the one who learnt his trade on a merchant ship out of Barry, and had the line from your letter put on his shoulder. I had copied it out for you in the margin of Grandad's old photograph, the French words he used to say at the table when the fire was low. Eddie wrote it out for him on tissue paper, and Tom came home with a square of gauze taped over it and a face like he'd swallowed a bee.

He says it will fade, that the skin takes what it's given and gives a bit back. I don't believe him. I think of the fine ink going in under the first layer, line by line, the same way the dust goes into the cloth and stays. Write to me soon and tell me whether the sea is still grey at Porthcawl, and whether you have started on the words yet. I can already see how they will sit across his collarbone when he takes his shirt off.

Your loving sister, Nell