Owl tattoo on a finger

The owl has come back to the rail every night since we crossed the line, and Mr Pryce says it is a bad omen, though he says that of most things. It is a small grey bird with a hooked beak and eyes as round as ship's biscuits, and it sits on the mainmast yard with its feathers ruffled against the wind as if it had paid for the passage. I have started leaving it a crust from my supper. Cook thinks I am mad.

Some nights I think it is the same owl that sat on the sill of our father's workshop in Whitby, the one you used to swear could count. You would hold up fingers and it would blink. I have been trying to remember how many you held up the last time, and I cannot, which is the worst thing about being this far out. Things slip.

On the twelfth night the wind dropped and the sea went flat as slate. The owl did not come. I stood at the rail for an hour with my hand out, and at last the watch changed and I went below. In the morning the captain had the lamp swinging in the forecastle, a boy from Lisbon was crying because he had dropped his tin of tobacco overboard, and the owl was sitting on the bowsprit, looking at all of us as if we were the strange ones.

I am sending this with the Gannet at Madeira. Count for me, will you, when you next see an owl. Tell me the number. I will know it is you.

Yours always, Tom