Black castle silhouette with the word Believe beneath it, surrounded by blue, green, purple, red and yellow fireworks, on the lower leg.

Disney-style castle with fireworks and Believe on a lower

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A black castle silhouette with layered turrets and flags sits at the centre, with the word Believe in black script beneath it. Coloured fireworks in blue, green, purple, red and yellow surround the castle, with soft, feathered edges. The castle is solid black with horizontal stripe detail, and the composition is centred on the lower leg against a plain skin background.

Calf Castle Believe Script Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ray Tolley cut stencils for the seafront shopfronts for thirty-one years, and the castle was the one he kept in the drawer longest. Its turrets were blunt, its flags no bigger than a fingernail, and he had never managed to get the bottom stripes even without a steel rule. Every October the arcade wanted fresh lettering, and every October Ray pulled the castle out again and sighed at it.

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His granddaughter Mia, nine, watched from the lino floor of the back room with a jam jar of brushes at her elbow. 'You could do the fireworks,' she said. 'Fireworks are easy. They're just wiggles.' Ray laughed and told her fireworks were the hardest thing to hold still, because the moment you tried they went off and became something else. So she dabbed green and blue and violet across the back of the old board, and the colours bled soft at their edges like breath on a window.

The council man came on Friday, looked at the board for a long time and asked who had painted the sky. Ray said the child had. The man asked if it could hang over the arcade door for the switch-on. Ray said yes, on one condition: the word underneath stayed. Believe, in Mia's wobbly capitals, traced over his stencil three times until it leaned like a boat in a wind.

That night the real fireworks went up over the pier, loud and bright and gone in a minute. Ray stood on the prom with his hands in his pockets and looked at the painted ones instead, because they stayed where he had put them.