Black linework tattoo of a smiling sloth hanging from a twig with a leaf, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Sloth hanging from a branch on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A smiling sloth hangs upside down from a curved branch with a small leaf at one end. The outlines are solid black with short dashes across the body to suggest fur, and the face has simple dot eyes and nose. The ink is black only on a plain forearm, with a grey stone wall behind.

Fine line Forearm Sloth Branch Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sloth came to Hollin Orchard in the August the river flooded, riding a bale of hay in the back of a carter's cart. Nobody in the village had seen one before, and Mother Asha said it meant the year would be slow. She was right about that much, though she never said whether she meant it as a blessing.

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The sloth would not come down. It hung from the crooked limb of the old codlin tree by its long hooked arms, and when the windfalls began to drop it smiled at them as they rolled past its face. The children tried to coax it with apples. The dogs barked until they gave up. Tobias Reed, who kept the bees and trusted nothing that moved slower than his bees, said it would starve and be done with. It did not starve. Each morning the leaves on its branch were a little thinner, and each morning the pears on the lower boughs were a little riper.

In the last week of the month the wasps came thick over the drops, and Tobias climbed the ladder with a pail of water to drown them. He found the sloth awake, looking at him with its round black eyes. It did not move. It only held its branch a little tighter, and he understood it had been keeping the fruit on the boughs until it was ready to let go.

That autumn the codlins came in heavy and sweet, and the sloth was still there when the first frost greyed the bramble. The children said it had gone to sleep for the winter. Tobias said nothing, but he left a windfall on the grass beneath the branch each evening, and each morning it was gone.