Tribal spiral tattoo on the back of a hand

The bolt of red cloth came off the Leeds train on Tuesday, and Mr Pardoe has set me to work the pattern into the hems before the regatta weekend. You would laugh at me. I have been copying the swirls off the stern of your old dinghy, the ones Dad cut with the gouge the summer before he went down with the trawler. Each spiral starts small at its centre and runs out, then turns back on itself as if it cannot decide whether to leave Harbour Row or stay.

I fill the gaps with close crosshatching, like the mesh hanging on the net loft wall, and I count the stitches by the paraffin lamp after Mother has gone up. Mrs Ashdown from the chandlery came in to ask whether the design was foreign. I told her it was ours, from the boathouse, and she looked at me the way she looks at the tide tables, as if they might be wrong.

I have kept the little flower for last. It is the one Dad carved into the tiller where his thumb always rested, five petals and a bud, and I have sewn it small at the cuff so it sits just where the red meets the bare wrist. Mr Pardoe says nobody will notice it. I think someone always does.

Write when you reach Aberdeen. Tell me if the herring boats still sing out at dawn, and whether the gulls there are as rude as they are here.

Your sister, Maud