Koko taught things without saying what she was teaching. At six she sat her down to thread needles. At eight, Nala was sewing buttons on the shirts they then sold at the market. It wasn't play: it was small-hands work, and Nala's were the stillest in the village. That's where the hands come from that today tattoo dotwork — thousands of dots, one by one, without rush — in a Johannesburg neighborhood called Maboneng, which means "place of light" in Sesotho.
The connection between the seamstress grandmother and the tattooist granddaughter isn't coincidence. It's direct inheritance, passed hand to hand the way needles are passed. If you want to read the full story — how Nala got from Limpopo to Maboneng, what happened with Koko, why she wears that collar — it's in her [biography](https://www.yagopartal.com/animal-kinhood/nala/).
But you don't need to know all that for the t-shirt to work. A kid sees an animal in a studded jacket and a pink hoodie and thinks it's fine. Fun. Someone they'd want to meet. And if they ask — and kids always ask — you can tell them about the ants with helmets.
