If you’re like most people, there are a few things you do every day. You brush your teeth and wash your face. You go to work. You eat lunch. After five, you get some dinner, relax, and go to bed. When you wake up, you drink a cup of coffee.

Coffee is the single most amazing, delicious, and existentially fulfilling part of any morning.

It doesn’t matter if you’re in the city on a grind, relaxing in the country, or hanging from a bivouac sac atop a sheer face on the side of Mount Aconcagua: no morning is complete without a cup of coffee.

People who get a coffee cup tattoo believe in the common cause of mankind. It doesn’t matter if you are a plumber, a high powered executive, a ruthless dictator, a school teacher, or starving artist, waking up is hard, and coffee makes it easier.

Like humanity itself, coffee originated in Africa and is now cultivated in tropical regions around the world. Despite the long history of co-existence between humans and the coffee plant, it took until around the 15th century in our current era for us to figure out how to roast beans and brew that magical brew. Scholars believe that it was the Sufis of Yemen who first made this astounding breakthrough. After the rest of the world caught on, that was that.

A coffee cup tattoo is a testament to the human condition, plain and simple.