Symmetrical ornamental star line design

He made one for Hester, the rope-dancer, a pendant no bigger than a thumbnail, with a lotus folded into its heart and a loop cut at the crown and another at the foot, so it would hang from a ribbon and not catch on her sleeves. She wore it up on the high wire. When the naphtha lamps came up she'd throw the light off it, and the crowd below would go quiet, and Osric would stand at the edge of the sawdust counting the interlaced wings with his lips moving, because every line in it had to close.

Then came the gale off the Wash, the autumn the wire snapped at Boston. Hester fell into the net, and the pendant spun off her throat and down into the Witham, where the water runs brown and fast. Osric went in after it on a rope with a storm lantern and came up three times, shaking his head, with nothing but silt under his nails. He didn't speak for a week. Then he went back to hammering, and the first thing he made was another star.

He made one every season after, and he always left the lower loop a little open, a hair's breadth gap, so a thread could be run through it. When people asked why, he said a thing that's meant to be worn ought to have somewhere to be hung from, even if it's only air.