Nala.

In the Maboneng studio there's a mug that always sits on the drawing table, between the ink jars and Koko's sewing needle that Nala doesn't use but won't move. It's a rooibos mug. Rooibos with nothing — no sugar, no milk. She makes it when she arrives at the studio at three in the afternoon, before cleaning the table and reviewing the day's designs. She drinks it in the first forty minutes. After that, between clients, she refills it. The rooibos goes lukewarm because Nala has no microwave in the studio — she has a lamp rescued from a dumpster at Arts on Main, a chair from a Jeppestown barbershop, a dentist's table, and a tattoo machine worth more than everything else combined. But no microwave.

The lukewarm rooibos is part of the ritual. Not the pretty ritual people talk about on Instagram: the one that means stopping three minutes between a dotwork session and the next, stretching the fingers, drinking something that isn't cold water, letting the hand rest before going back to puncturing skin for three hours. Nala caps her sessions at three hours. Never more. The aardwolf doesn't destroy the termite mound — it harvests and lets it grow back. Nala does the same with the bodies she tattoos and with her own hands.

The ceramicist two doors down sometimes brings her rooibos already made on Sundays. They don't talk much. Sometimes not at all. They sit at the studio door and drink in silence while Fox Street goes quiet. That's Maboneng on a Sunday afternoon: a place of light with no one watching.

The colored interior of this mug is the detail that connects it most to Nala without needing to explain it. The denim jacket covered in pyramid studs is the aardwolf's crest — pure display, visual intimidation, the look of someone you wouldn't approach without a reason. And underneath, the pink of the hoodie. The pink that shows. The one Nala lets show. The inside of the mug does the same thing: on the outside, the portrait with all the metal and all the attitude; on the inside, the color.

I'm not going to tell you a mug changes your mornings. It's a mug. It's for drinking. What it does have is an image that holds its own: the portrait of Nala by Yago Partal, printed on ceramic at the resolution of the original artwork, and a colored interior that doesn't fade because the print is part of the glaze, not a surface layer. In **Material and finish** you'll find the ceramic type and the process.

What this mug has that others don't is that the image isn't clip art pasted on. It's a portrait with a story: a girl from Limpopo who saw someone tattooing for the first time at a Polokwane market when she was fourteen, who brought coffee to a tattooist three Saturdays in a row until he let her practice on pig skin, and who now has her own studio in a former tailor's workshop where her grandmother would have recognized the way of working — stitch by stitch, no rush, without destroying what you have underneath. The mug carries that story compressed into a single gaze. But you don't need to know it to use it. It's enough that you like how the aardwolf looks on the kitchen counter, or next to the monitor, or on the studio table where you work.