Yellow sun tattoo on an upper arm

We came in past the breakwater at six this morning with the fog lying on the water like wet wool, and I thought we'd be blind until noon. Then the sun came up behind the Ness, a flat hard yellow as bright as the paint Dilys mixed for the wheelhouse, and the whole fleet turned towards it as if someone had rung a bell. Skipper says he has never once seen the sun rise in the wrong place. I told him that's only because he never looks anywhere else.

Dilys painted it the spring before your hip was done, when the boat was still called the Margaret Ann and nobody had yet argued about the name. She used a brush no wider than a pencil and outlined every ray in brown so it would stand out when the spray hit. Forty rays, she said, one for each net we'd hauled that season. I didn't believe her until I counted them myself last night, sitting on the hatch with a flask, and they came to forty-one. She said she'd put one in for luck and wouldn't tell me which.

The gulls were screaming over the catch when the Brighton Lass lost her engine out past the Carr. For an hour we saw nothing but that sun, bobbing over the swell like a lamp left burning in a window. Skipper put our bow straight at it. We found them drifting with their decks awash and nobody hurt, which is more than I'd have bet.

Tell Dilys the forty-first ray held. I'll bring you a box of kippers on Thursday, and you can tell me which one she meant.