Starry Night tattoo on the lower leg

The stars out here will not sit still. I have stopped telling the mess lads they are only stars, because they laugh at me and go back to peeling potatoes. Tonight the sky over the headland looked as if someone had stirred it with a spoon and forgotten to stop. Every star had a halo of its own, pale yellow bleeding out into blue, and the big one low over the water bent its light the way a lamp does in a draught.

Cook says the cypress on the point is older than the lighthouse. It stands black and thin with its top flicking like a flame, and I swear it leaned towards me when I went up for the rope. I did not tell him that. He would only say I've been at the rum the Frenchman sold us, and he might be right about the rum.

Here is what I did. On Saturday, after the galley was scrubbed, I took lamp black from the stove pipe and a tin of the blue dye we use for the bunting, and I tried to draw the sky on the back of a flour sack. My lines came out stiff as rope. The swirls I could not manage at all. Every curl broke off before it finished, the way a wave does against a rock.

I am keeping the sack folded in my kit. When we land at Marseille I will buy proper paint, and when I come home I will show you something that moves. Your loving brother, Tom.