Black line tattoo of a sloth hanging from a leafy branch, with dotted shading on its body, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sloth hanging from a branch on an arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A sloth hangs upside down from a thin branch with two small leaves, drawn in simple black outline. The sloth's body and limbs are filled with small dots that give a textured, shaded look, while its face is left mostly open. The design is set against plain, lightly tanned skin, with the branch curving across the top of the composition.

Dotwork Upper arm Sloth Branch Leaves Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pell found the sloth on the third Tuesday of March, hanging by its back feet from the hawthorn at the bottom of Cotter's Lane, and she told anyone who would stand still long enough to hear it. Nobody in Ashby Fold had seen a sloth before. The vicar thought it was a dropped toy. The children thought it was a dare. Only Walter Dunn, who kept the bees, looked at it for a whole minute and said it looked as though it had been waiting.

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The creature did not climb down. It hung with its arms folded, its dotted fur gone grey with rain, and its small round face turned towards the lane as if it were reading the notices pinned to the post office door. Walter brought it a pear. It took the pear in no particular hurry, and by the time it had finished, the village had decided it belonged to Ashby Fold the way the mill did, slow and certain and not to be argued with.

At Michaelmas the village held its wager, a race from the church gate to the mill wheel, and the schoolmaster entered his greyhound out of spite. The dog ran. The bell rang. Halfway along the lane the greyhound stopped to sniff a gatepost, and the sloth, which had not moved an inch since dawn, was already hanging from the mill's cross-beam with its face to the water. Nobody could say how it got there. Walter said the branch had simply reached further than the rest of us.

The schoolmaster asked for his shilling back and was told the bet had been on the sloth all along. The next spring Mrs Pell tied a red ribbon around the hawthorn's thinnest limb, and the leaves came out two at a time, as they always do, later than anyone expected and exactly when they should.