Displaying description beside image, rather than as alt text...

I have been asked to allow each image to have a lengthy description displayed to the side of each image.
I've changed the code to have all the description boxes appear as textarea, rather than textfield.. and I've updated the node_images database table to TEXT, rather than VARCHAR...
All good, I can now enter uber long descriptions...

However, I can't figure out where in the code to extract the alt text (description) and display it next to the image.. I can't even find the description variable to use...

Is this even possible?