I am working on a Madhubani piece for a buyer in Patna, fish pair around a lotus, and everything is fine except one thing. The eye of the left fish. In our tradition the fish eye is a small circle with a dot inside, and the outer line should be drawn in one breath, no joining. I have done it four times now and each time it comes out the same way, slightly heavy on the upper side, so the fish looks sleepy or maybe annoyed, not alert. My mother would have said the hand is thinking too much.

The trouble is I cannot correct it by painting over. Paper is handmade, the black is lamp black mixed with gum, and any second coat sits on top like a patch, dull where the rest is deep. So I have to redraw the whole fish. Four fishes have gone into the waste pile near my charpai. My wife has stopped asking.

What I am asking myself is whether a small heaviness in one eye is a fault at all, or whether I have been looking at it so long that I have lost the piece. Sometimes we keep only the one wrong thing in front of the eyes and the rest of the painting becomes invisible.

If anyone has faced this with fine line work, the point where you cannot tell if it is a mistake or your own hand's character, I would like to hear how you decide to stop.