Symmetrical scrollwork back tattoo

The scaffold came down on Tuesday, and Mr Halloran finally let me set the centre rose with my own trowel. You would laugh at me. For three weeks I have stood under that ceiling with my neck bent back like a heron's, copying the acanthus leaves from the old drawings Father sent from Bath, and every morning the leaves looked less like leaves and more like somebody's careful argument. Halloran says the trick is the sunburst. Lay the rays out first, he says, or the scrolls will wander off and get lost.

So I pinned a cord to the centre boss and drew twelve lines out to the cornice with a fine stick of chalk, then sixty more between them, until the whole ceiling looked like a dandelion clock somebody had bent towards the light. The lattice went in after, little diamonds cross-hatched into the panels between the volutes, and that was the part that nearly broke me. One slip and the whole pattern drifts a finger's width out of true, and nobody notices until the sun comes through the east window at four and throws every error into the open.

The strange thing is that when I finally stood back on Wednesday, the room seemed to lean inward, as if the whole building were listening. Halloran took off his cap and said nothing for almost a minute, which for him is a sermon. Then he said the ornament would outlast us both, and that was the only time I have ever heard him sound soft.

Write again soon, and tell Mother I am eating properly.

Yours in plaster and dust, Tom