Black and grey neo-trad tattoo of a sleeping sloth with three banners reading nap all day, sleep all night and party never, on a limb.

Sleeping sloth with banner text

Neo-trad · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A sleeping sloth curls across the centre of the design, with its face, closed eyes and long claws visible below three stacked banners. The sloth is drawn with fine, stippled shading and soft grey tones that give its fur depth, while the banners use clean outlines and flat fill. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on a pale area of skin against a dark, blurred background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell in Thorncombe had rung for the third time before Ottoline Pike gave up on the sloth and went to fetch the ladder herself. Hobb had been hanging from the lowest bough of the chestnut since the summer fair, or so the boys claimed. He was a grey bundle of fur with his arms crooked and his eyes shut, and the wasps had long since stopped bothering him.

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"The harvest supper starts at seven," she called up. "You promised the fiddlers you'd bring the lanterns."

One eye opened slowly, the way a shutter might. Hobb considered the lanterns, the fiddlers and the sky going the colour of weak tea. Then he shut the eye again.

That spring the landlord of the Drowned Hare had paid a shilling a night for a creature who would hang from the beams and do nothing at all. The crowd cheered him for his steadfast refusal to fall off, and his fame spread as far as Sudbury. Then the landlord's nephew wanted him to dance, and Hobb simply went back to sleep, and the whole pub fell quiet to see whether he would wake. Ottoline had never seen anything so restful or so unbearable.

She climbed the ladder with a lantern in her teeth, rested her forehead against his cool grey shoulder and said nothing. Below her, the village was already gathering in the long grass. The fiddlers tuned, then played so softly that the leaves barely moved. By the time the first moon rose, Hobb was snoring in time with the reel, and nobody had the heart to wake him.

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