Vertical script tattoo down the upper back

The stone for the chapel door came up from the quarry on Monday, and Mr Pardoe wants the inscription cut down the left jamb before the first frost. He says it must read top to bottom, the way the old carvers did, so I have been sitting with a chisel and a mug of stewed tea trying to keep the letters upright without them leaning into each other.

The lettering itself is not the hard part. The hard part is the verse, which belongs to a boatman called Samuel Coombe, twenty-two, drowned off the Shambles in March. His mother dictated it to me in the kitchen and then made me read it back three times because she kept moving a comma. On Wednesday I cut the first column while she stood in her black coat and watched. When I finished the last stroke she laid her thumb on the top of the S and said, very quietly, that it was the first thing she had seen in a year that looked finished.

I thought about that all the way home on the bus, and about you going off to Leeds with the good chisels. I have started keeping the offcuts. There is a shelf of them at the back of the yard, small sheared blocks, and every one has a letter on it that I cut and then got wrong. Pardoe calls it waste. I call it the only honest record of how I learnt.

Come down at the weekend and I will show you the jamb. At four o'clock the light comes across it the colour of weak tea, and you can read every word from the lane without squinting.

Your loving sister, Nell