Close-up of a traditional style tattoo of a smiling sloth hanging from a branch in bold black outline with dotted fur shading, on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sloth hanging from a branch on a leg

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a sloth hanging by its arms and legs from a horizontal branch, with its face turned towards the viewer. Bold black outlines define the body and branch, while stippled dotwork fills the fur in brown and grey tones. Small pink cheeks and red accents add colour, and partly visible colour tattoos sit at the top and left edges of the frame.

Traditional Dotwork Calf Sloth Branch Animal

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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

Sit down, sit down, the wasps have gone off to their suppers now. You want the sloth story? Everybody in Pell's Orchard knows it, though they'll tell it wrong. Old Harriet Quaile had the top field then, forty trees of Bramleys and one grey-barked russet that nobody could be bothered to pick. Up in that russet hung a sloth. Brown as a wet sack, with a face like a kind uncle who has forgotten your name.

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He'd come in on a lorry from the docks at Hull, so the story goes, stowed in a crate of onions, and he took one look at the orchard and decided that was that. He did not climb down. Not for the pickers, not for the rain, not for the men from the council who came with a ladder and a clipboard in August. He hung by his four hooks from the one long bough and looked at them with those round white eyes until they went home.

Harriet brought him a windfall every evening, rolled up in her apron. She said he ate it slowly, the way you'd read a letter twice. And here's the part they leave out at the pub. Come October, when every other tree had been stripped to the bone, the russet still had one apple on it, high and red, just beyond anybody's reach. It hung there all winter. Nobody touched it. The sloth had been watching it since midsummer, and he was not going to let the wind have it before he was ready.

So if you're ever in that field late in the year, look up. You'll find him still there, hanging on, and the apple too, waiting for him to be ready.