Colour tattoo of a leg lamp in a wooden crate with a red banner reading A MAJOR AWARD, on a lower leg.

Leg lamp in a crate with banner

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

The design shows a lamp with a fringed shade and a fishnet-patterned stem, packed inside a slatted wooden crate. A ribbon banner across the lower part of the design reads A MAJOR AWARD. Bold black outlines and soft brown, tan and red shading give the wood and lampshade depth, and the banner has red shading against the lighter skin tone.

Traditional Lettering Calf Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Our Ron,

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You will not believe what came up the lane on Tuesday. The Welfare committee drew the raffle at the Christmas social, and Dad's ticket was the one called, so the prize was a lamp. A proper lamp, shade fringed like a flapper's, stem twisted in a fishnet pattern that Mam says is the height of something. It came packed in a slatted crate with A MAJOR AWARD painted across the front in red, as if the crate itself had won something.

Dad would not let it out of the crate. He said the lamp was too good for the front room until we knew what it was for, so the crate sat in the yard for two days while the rain got under the slats. Mam wanted it in the parlour by the window. Dad wanted it on the mantel. In the end Auntie Gwen came round with a screwdriver and the two of them argued the thing into the corner, where it now throws a warm pool of light across the coal bunker.

Here is the strange part. Since it went up, Dad comes in off the late shift and sits in that corner without switching on the overhead bulb. Nobody has asked him why. I think it reminds him of the lamp he carried down the drift for thirty years, though this one is a far grander thing, and I think he has decided he has earned one thing in this house that shines for nobody but himself.

Write soon, and tell me whether they sell crates like that in Sydney.

Your loving brother, Dave