I hope this doesn’t confuse you.
Looks like you need to make a new texture set to uv, and make a new uv layer. Unwrap the mesh on this layer from top view, projected to view and bounds, then you need to bake or clone paint the small texture onto the new one so that you can then have a new larger mapped texture to paint your details onto. I just think that using a small tileable texture won’t work for you if you are wanting to paint just a portion of your mesh.
ok thanks a lot craig I just went into gimp and made it small tiles, saved the pic then put in the new texture thanks.