Sketch-style tattoo of a sloth clutching a branch, with red, orange and blue washes, on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sloth with watercolour washes on thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A sloth-like animal with a rounded head and closed eyes hangs from a curled limb, its long fur drawn with loose, feathered black linework. Soft red, orange and blue washes sit beneath the lines, giving a loose watercolour effect. The animal fills the frame diagonally across the thigh, with the skin edges visible at the corners.

Thigh Sloth Animal Fur Claw Branch

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

Every morning the old woman at the bottom of Cutter's Lane went out in her slippers and found the sloth still hanging from the quince tree, one arm curled round the branch like a hook nobody had bothered to straighten. She brought it a bowl of water and a heel of soft bread. She did not ask it anything. Her grandmother had told her that creatures who came into a garden in the wet month were guests of the garden, and guests did not owe their names.

Keep reading

The village wanted it gone by midsummer. The vicar said the quince would never fruit with a thing like that sleeping in it, and the Pargeter brothers, who kept bees, said it was slow and had cost them two swarms through sheer patience. Nobody could say what it ate, or where it had come from, or why its long fur had taken on the colours of the sky over the marsh at dusk, rust and blue and the dull orange of a banked fire. When the men arrived with ladders, the sloth did not stir, so the ladders were leant back against the wall and the men went home for their tea.

The old woman died in the first frost. Nobody saw the sloth come down, but the children found it on the lane in the morning, moving at the speed of thought towards the churchyard gate, and the bowl by the tree was still full of water. That year the quince bore so heavily that the branches broke, and where the sloth's arm had rested all winter, there was a pale print in the bark, washed blue by the rain.