Black and white line drawing of a sloth wrapped in three hatched banners reading NAP ALL DAY, SLEEP ALL NIGHT and PARTY NEVER, shown as a flash design.

Sloth with nap, sleep and party banners

Black and grey · Flash

A cartoon sloth with a small round face and heavy-lidded eyes hangs across the centre of the drawing, with its arms and claws gripping three ribbon banners. The banners carry the words NAP ALL DAY, SLEEP ALL NIGHT and PARTY NEVER in bold capitals, with hatched shading on the ribbon folds and a stippled-style fill on the sloth's face. The design is rendered only in black ink on a white background, with no colour.

Sloth Banner Ribbon Lettering Slogan

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate said FRAGILE on two sides and PERISHABLE on the third, and Ada Pringle, who had run the harbour office at Gullsby for thirty-one years, read the manifest twice before she prised off the lid. Inside, packed in straw, was a sloth with the face of a disappointed bishop. It regarded her slowly, the way the town council regarded every proposal she had ever made, as if deciding whether she was worth the effort of a reply.

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The boatyard lads wanted it for the regatta. Ada's nephew Terry, who lettered signs for the Ship Inn and had opinions about kerning, painted three ribbons in tar-black and gold: NAP ALL DAY, SLEEP ALL NIGHT and PARTY NEVER. The sloth took one look at them, unhooked its claws from the cabin roof and wrapped itself around the bunting pole as if the banners had been made for it. Nobody could shift it. The regatta committee wrote to the paper.

In October the gale came in off the Skerries, and the lifeboat crew hammered on the office door at three in the morning. Ada went down the slipway in her dressing gown with a torch and a bad temper. The sloth was still up the mast, gripping the ribbons, not moving a muscle, and when the lifeboat's searchlight swept the quay, the sloth was the only thing on the harbour wall that did not flinch. The party had been cancelled weeks before. Nobody had been dancing.

By dawn the boats were all in and the wind had dropped to a sulk. Ada sat down on an upturned creel beneath the mast, the first time in three decades she had sat anywhere without a ledger on her knee. Above her the sloth yawned, very slowly, and went back to sleep on PARTY NEVER.