Colour traditional tattoo of a sloth hanging from a leafy branch with a banner reading nap all day, sleep all night, party never, on a limb.

Sloth on a banner with nap and sleep lettering

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A sloth hangs from a branch with green leaves, with three scrolling banners across its body reading NAP ALL DAY, SLEEP ALL NIGHT and PARTY NEVER. The outlines are bold and black, with shaded grey on the banners and brown and olive tones on the sloth, and small dots scattered around the design. Other partial tattoos, including a figure in red and a purple shape, appear at the edges of the frame on the same limb.

Traditional Other Sloth Banner Leaves Branch Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, pull that stool up, and mind the tins, they're still hot enough to take the skin off a knuckle. You want the rest of this? Then listen. The sloth came in through the yard gate at ten to four, the morning old Greaves was proving the rye, and it came slow, the way they do, one hand and then the other along the washing line.

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Greaves swore at it. He'd been up since midnight with the ovens and his back felt like a sack of gravel. He flapped a tea towel at it, but the thing only hung from the rafter above the proving baskets, blinking like a man woken at a bad time, and would not be moved. Every time he reached for it, it stretched a little further, and the lime leaves it had carried in from Mill Lane came down one by one and settled in his flour.

By five the loaves were out and the sky was a rumour behind the chimneys. Greaves sat on an upturned crate to eat the heel of the first tin, and the sloth came down its own long arm, unhurried, and took the crust from his fingers. It chewed. It considered him with those dark, patient eyes. Then it curled up on the warm rack above the ovens and slept, and Greaves, who had not sat still in nineteen years, found he could not get up.

That spring he hung a card in the shop window: Open before dawn, shut after noon. Nobody ever asked why he took his afternoons so seriously. If you pass Mill Lane on a grey morning, you can still see the lamps come on, and a little grey shape hanging from the lime tree, watching the first tray go in.