Nebula and stars on a forearm

The prior had told him to paint the cloud of Saint Brendan's vision above the basins, a soft grey sky for the washing of hands. Tobias did not want grey. He ground lapis from the Venetian packet until his thumbs were blue to the knuckle, then he mixed in the violet from the cloister windows, which the sun had bleached to the colour of old plums. When the lapis ran short in the spring he made do with woad from the dyers in the valley, and the magenta he took from the beetroot the novices were meant to be boiling for soup.

On the eleventh night of work he climbed the scaffold with a candle in his teeth and found the sky above the lavabo was not the sky he had been painting. Out over the marsh a great dust of gas hung in the dark, blue at the heart and pink at the rim, and across it the real stars were pricked like salt. He stood there until the candle guttered and he had to finish by feel. He wanted to paint what he saw, and he could not, so he left small holes in the plaster, pale circles where the wet ground showed through.

The novices were set to fill them with a needle and a pot of white lead, one star a day, which took them two winters. Ask any of them now which star is theirs and they will show you a dot on the ceiling and tell you that Tobias could not have got the sky right without them. He was wrong about that. The ceiling is right because it has holes in it, and the light comes through.