Watercolour-style sky tattoo on upper arm

The big top backdrop came off the frame this morning, and I nearly cried into the size bucket. Mr Harrow wanted the sky repainted for Margate by Saturday, the old one gone grey from the generator smoke, so I did the whole thing in a week with a borrowed ladder and the cook's kettle to thin the wash. Pinks first, the way Mother taught us, then the violets pulled in wet so they bled into the teal like weather coming over the sea.

Here is the trouble. The canvas came back from the carrier with a piece cut out of the lower left corner, a neat notch the size of a child's hand, as if someone had lifted it out for a jigsaw. Harrow swears it was the carrier. The carrier swears it was the wind. I have spent two evenings trying to paint over the gap and it will not take. The sky keeps wanting to tear the way real sky does, in those ragged feathered edges up along the top.

So I did the one honest thing. I left the notch alone and pricked white crosses into the wash where the stars should be, a dozen of them, small enough to miss unless you stood close. The crowds do stand close. Last night a boy of about seven stood under it with his mouth open and counted them out loud, and when he got to twelve he said, quite seriously, that the missing bit was where the moon had gone to fetch its coat.

I'm keeping the notch. Come and see it before we fold on Sunday.

Yours in paint, Ada