Neo-traditional tattoo of a smiling sloth with a pink dahlia, red roses and orange lilies on the outer thigh, with a banner beneath.

Sloth with roses and lilies on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A smiling sloth fills the centre of the design, with a pink dahlia, two red roses and orange lilies with green foliage arranged around its head and shoulders. The sloth is shaded in greys and browns with bold dark outlines, while the flowers use solid, saturated colour. A yellow and orange banner with partly visible lettering, reading something like live slow and die when never, sits along the bottom, and the diptych shows the same tattoo from two angles.

Neo-trad Traditional Thigh Sloth Dahlia Rose Lily Banner Flower Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the kettle's only just boiled and I'm not hurrying for anybody. You want the tale of the sloth on Skerrow Head? Then you'll take it at its own pace, same as the creature did. Mabs Orrin's cousin sent it over from Belém in a crate lined with wet sacking, and the ship's cook swore it ate a whole sack of biscuits before it reached Hull. Walt Benning took one look at it, shrugged, and said a lighthouse keeper's life was mostly waiting anyway, so it might as well have company.

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The rule on that rock was simple. The lamp was wound every four hours, the weights hauled up a hundred and twelve iron steps, and nobody who climbed them ever went fast. Walt went fast. He went fast the winter his knees gave out and came down on his backside, cursing the gulls. The sloth didn't hurry. It took the ladder one hooked claw at a time, humming at the sea, and by its first spring it had never once missed a winding. Mabs said that was what came of living slow. Walt said it was what came of living lazy, then laughed till he coughed.

The storm came in the second week of October, the kind that lifts slates off the cottages and throws the sea over the landing. Walt's chest had gone bad and Mabs was across at her sister's in Hebdon. So the sloth went up alone in the dark with a paraffin lantern strapped to its back. It took an hour and a half to reach the lamp room, and the wind screamed at it the whole way, and it did not hurry once. When Walt crawled up at first light, the beam was turning, the weights were full, and the creature lay against the brass housing with its eyes half shut, as if it had found nothing remarkable in the night at all.

Walt painted the old words on the lamp room wall that winter, in yellow ochre, under a lily he'd copied from Mabs's garden: LIVE SLOW. DIE WHEN NEVER. Nobody on Skerrow ever argued with it, though plenty of them tried climbing faster and came down sorry.