Traditional-style flash design on a wooden board showing a smiling sloth above a banner reading DON'T HURRY BE HAPPY, framed by colourful flowers and leaves.

Sloth with banner flash design

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A brown sloth with a pale face sits centrally, gripping a scroll banner that reads DON'T HURRY BE HAPPY, and it is framed by green leaves. Below the banner, three flowers in pink, purple and blue sit on dark green foliage. The bold black outlines, flat fills and bright colours are typical of traditional tattoo flash, and the design is printed on a light wooden panel held by a hand.

Traditional Sloth Banner Flower Leaves Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the wasps on the windfalls. Tommy, put that one back, it's been sulking since Tuesday. Right. You want the one about Mabs Ruddock and the sloth in the medlar tree. Well, it was the August the perry pears came in all at once, the whole orchard gone gold, and every soul in Pennick Cross was running up and down the rows as if their trousers were on fire.

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Alf Ruddock had three ladders out and was halfway up the tallest when he saw the sloth. It had come down off the hills with a tangle of pale fur on its back, and it hung from the lowest bough of the medlar, upside down, arms folded like a pensioner waiting for a bus. Alf shouted at it. The sloth looked at him, slowly, the way a kettle comes to the boil, and went back to its nap. Nobody could shift it. They tried a broom, a bucket of windfalls and Mabs' best hymn, and the creature only blinked as if they were the odd ones out.

Then the rain came in off the Severn, grey as slate, and the whole village panicked and went skidding off the rungs. Mabs sat down on the orchard bench with her flask and her cardigan and waited. The sloth, from its bough, reached out one long arm, very leisurely, and hooked the top rung of the nearest ladder so it stayed put in the gusts. Then it did the same for the next, and the next, and nobody broke a bone, because nobody was in any hurry to break one.

By the time the sky cleared, the pears were in the barn, sorted by size, and Alf was asleep on the bench with his cap over his face. Mabs looked up at the sloth, still hanging there, and said what she'd always said to anyone who'd listen. Don't hurry, be happy. And the sloth seemed to agree, because it shut its eyes and didn't stir again until the frost.