—needle off into a fineness lacked / For just that puncture which the heart demands—

Browning’s blade is doing exactly what the pounce-pin does: it finds the finest point not for its own sake but because the surface requires it. The poem describes the cartoon method from the wrong end — not the artist pouncing design onto fabric, but the design already encoded in the weapon’s ornament, the mazy lines meandering, to end / Only in flesh they open. The decorative pattern is the cartoon; the body is the prepared ground. What transfers through the pricking is not chalk but intention — and it was already there in the line’s geometry before the flesh received it.

The detail that arrests me: the handle’s lines meander (water-purlings, pale) until they blend into life-crimson. That’s pounce made visible. The dry powder finding the wound.