Close-up of a black-outlined lightning bolt tattoo filled with rainbow stripes on the upper arm of a person wearing a blue top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rainbow-filled lightning bolt on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A lightning bolt is tattooed on the upper arm, outlined in solid black and filled with horizontal bands of red, orange, yellow, green and blue that shade into purple at the lower tip. The bolt is shown on bare skin against a blue sleeve and a soft-focus bedroom background. The colour is bold and saturated, and the photograph is taken at a slight angle with the bolt running diagonally down the frame.

Upper arm Lightning bolt Rainbow Stripe

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bolt took the north transept window at twenty past four, while Mr Okonedo and I were eating our sandwiches on the scaffold planks. We heard it before we saw it, a crack like a rifle shot inside a tin box, and then the whole church smelt of hot pennies.

Keep reading

The window had been saints, mostly, painted in the grey and brown the Victorians loved, but the panel the vicar cared about was the zigzag of light in the lower corner. It was a lightning bolt of red, amber, lemon, emerald, cobalt and plum, held in lead, and his grandmother had paid for it so that children would have something to look at during the sermon. Under the rain we found the storm had cracked the saints into spiderwebs and left the bolt standing, its lead came blackened and sagging like a wet fringe.

We cut the new glass by hand over three weeks. I laid the bands out on the bench in order, red at the top, violet at the point, and Mr Okonedo asked me why the tip had to be purple. I told him the old cartoon in the vestry drawer had it that way, and that it was also what the sky does after a storm, bruising down to plum over the flat fields before the dark comes in.

On the first sunny morning we set the last piece and stood back. The bolt threw its colours down across the nave, over the pews and the cold stone floor, and a boy in the front row lay flat on his stomach and pressed his palm against the light as if he could hold it still.