Small tribal hedgehog tattoo

The officer at Kestrel Bridge took Grandfather's charm out of my bag and turned it over three times under the strip light. It is only a hedgehog, I said, carved from a scrap of bog oak, and he did not answer. He ran his thumb along the spines instead, slowly, the way you would count coins you did not trust.

Behind me the lorries idled in a row, drivers asleep with their knees against the steering wheels. Everyone at that checkpoint was curled up tight, waiting to be let open again. Grandfather used to say a hedgehog is the only animal that wins an argument by refusing to have one, and I believed him for years. Standing there in my wet coat, I thought he had meant something else: that the spines are how you carry the whole of yourself without anyone being able to hold you.

The officer handed the charm back and stamped my papers with a sound like a dropped pebble. Then he lifted his cuff, and there on the inside of his wrist was a small black hedgehog, its head just beginning to lift out of its curl. He said his mother had kept them in the garden in Brest, and that he had not seen one since he was nine.

I am posting the charm to you, Marta, wrapped in my spare scarf. Tell Papa it is safe. Tell him the crossing took nothing from it but a fingerprint. Love, Ilse.