Colourful neo-traditional tattoo of a lightbulb reading Look on the bright side, surrounded by clouds, raindrops, a lightning bolt and a crescent moon, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Look on the bright side lightbulb on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A lightbulb containing the handwritten words Look on the bright side sits at the centre of the design, framed by pastel clouds, green raindrops, a lightning bolt, a crescent moon and sparkling stars. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with glittery highlights in the bulb, stars and clouds. The bright palette of teal, purple, yellow, pink and orange fills the composition, which is photographed straight on against a white cloth.

Neo-trad Calf Cloud Lightning bolt Raindrop Crescent moon Star Slogan

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp over the stove had swung on its hook since the Marjorie Lark cleared the harbour wall, and by the second watch Maureen Pask had stopped trying to keep the pans still. She stirred the stew one-handed, hip wedged against the bench, listening to the hull groan like an old man getting out of a chair. Rain hammered the porthole in sheets. Every few minutes the sky over the Dogger Bank split white and the galley leapt into view: tin cups, a drying cloth, the cook's boy asleep among the flour sacks.

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The bulb over the table had died at the turn of the tide. Maureen had fitted the spare herself that morning, a squat glass globe bought from a chandler in Grimsby for eleven pence, and she had written across its frosted front with a stub of marker, the way her mother once wrote shopping lists on the backs of envelopes. Look on the bright side. Her mother had said it over every burst pipe, every short catch, every husband who came home smelling of the Ship Inn.

"Will we sink?" asked Danny, pushing up on one elbow among the sacks. "Not tonight," Maureen said, though she had no way of knowing that. She climbed onto the bench, reached up to the dead socket and screwed the bulb home. It flickered, caught and glowed yellow-white, and the words lit up all at once, bright and crooked. Danny squinted at them. "Doesn't look bright to me." "Give it till morning," she said.

By dawn the cloud had torn open over the Bank and a thin moon hung above the spray, the colour of marmalade. Maureen switched the light off and on again for the boy's benefit, watching the words blink in and out against the grey window until the sea seemed to have agreed, for the time being, to be patient with them.