Line drawing flash of a sloth in a suit and bow tie inside an ornate oval frame, with roses and leaves below, shown on paper.

Sloth in a suit within an ornate frame with roses

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows an anthropomorphic sloth in a jacket and bow tie, set in an oval frame with scrolling flourishes. Two roses and leaves sit beneath the frame, and the sloth's face and clothing are shaded in grey. The design is drawn in bold black outline with soft grey shading and no colour.

Neo-trad Botanical Sloth Suit Bow tie Rose Leaves Oval frame Scrollwork Portrait

Find an artist for this

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

The portrait was commissioned in the spring of 1887, when Mr Ambrose Pellow, a sloth of considerable means and no discernible hurry, decided the dining room at Hollin Court required a likeness of himself. The painter, Miss Verity Coombes, arrived with her easel and a tin of brushes, and found her sitter took eleven minutes to turn his head from the window.

Keep reading

She worked through the summer, grey wash by grey wash, while he sat in a bottle-green jacket and a bow tie his valet retied twice a day. He insisted on roses for the foot of the frame, two of them, cut from the walled garden that morning. "Let them open a little more," he said, and so they did, slowly, until the petals were the colour of old lace and the stems bent over the paper like tired guests.

By autumn the likeness was finished, and Mr Pellow declared it perfect. Before she packed her brushes he asked for one more thing: a scroll at the top of the frame, left blank. "Leave it empty," he said. "I will have to be told when." Verity laughed, and he did not.

For years afterwards the housemaids swore the roses in the dining room stayed fresher than any in the garden, and that on certain mornings the gentleman in the frame had moved his hand a little closer to the flowers.