Nala.

In Maboneng, the Johannesburg neighborhood where [Nala](https://www.yagopartal.com/animal-kinhood/nala/) has her tattoo studio, the electricity goes without warning. Load shedding, they call it. Eskom cuts by zone — two hours, four hours, sometimes more. Most businesses close or wait. Nala doesn't wait.

She has a small generator — the kind that makes more noise than power — and a construction headlamp left to her by an electrician in exchange for a forearm tattoo. When the power goes mid-session, there are fifteen seconds of total silence: the machines stop, the music dies, the air conditioning hum disappears. And then the generator starts. A dry sputter that vibrates through the concrete floor. Nala puts on the headlamp, adjusts the angle, and keeps going. The needle goes back to the skin as if nothing happened. The client sometimes doesn't even notice they're in the dark. All they see is the white beam on their arm and Nala's hands, which haven't moved a millimeter.

She's done it so many times she has a routine: generator, headlamp, water bottle for the client, keep going. No drama. She doesn't stop the session unless the outage lasts more than six hours, and that's happened exactly twice in three years. The aardwolf is nocturnal by nature — it hunts termites in complete darkness, navigating by hearing and smell, not sight. Nala tattoos the same way: if there's light, good; if not, she adapts. She works at night anyway. The difference between Eskom cutting and Eskom running is just the background noise.

Some nights the outage coincides with the longest session, the ten o'clock one. The client arrived on time, the design is transferred onto the skin, two hours of dotwork left — thousands of dots, one by one, in a geometric pattern growing from the shoulder blade toward the collarbone. And the lights go out. Nala switches on the headlamp, starts the generator, and tells the client: "If you want to stop, we stop. If you want to keep going, we keep going." Most want to keep going. There's something about being tattooed in the dark, with the generator running in the background, that turns the session into something different. More silence between the two of them. Less phone. Fewer distractions. Nala prefers it, though she doesn't say so.

The sweatshirt in front of you isn't tattooed in the dark, but it's made with the same logic of precision Nala applies to every session: all-over print, which means the aardwolf portrait isn't interrupted at the seams. It's printed on the fabric first and then cut and sewn. That gives the design continuity. The details of the studded jacket, the pink sweatshirt showing underneath, the spike collar — all there, across the entire surface.

Sizes run XS to 2XL. In **Fabric, fit and construction** you'll find the fabric composition and cut type. If you're between two sizes, the **Size guide** has exact measurements per size. Made to order — no stock, each unit is printed when you order it. Timelines and conditions are in **Shipping and returns**.