Every so often I fill a spread with whatever is actually in my pens rather than whatever I've been meaning to try, and the result is always more honest than a curated palette would be. This month it's fifteen pens, fifteen inks, and a colour scheme I did not consciously decide on.
It's autumn. Apparently my pens knew before I did.
The browns took over
Five of the fifteen are some flavour of brown, and they're doing very different jobs.
Sailor Jentle Rikyū-cha in the Pilot Custom 823 is the darkest thing on either page — near-black in the swab, resolving into a deep warm brown at writing width. Rikyū-cha is a traditional Japanese colour name, the greenish-brown associated with the tea master Sen no Rikyū, and there is a green cast in there once you stop looking for it.
Lennon Tool Bar Sesame Oil in the Delta Montepetra has the widest tonal range on the page. In the thin areas it's a light, slightly dusty tan. Where it pools it goes properly dark, close to bitter chocolate. If you only ever saw a writing sample you'd think it was a mid-brown and nothing more.
Sailor × Kingdom Note Uca arcuata in the Leonardo Momento Magico Foglia is the golden one — ochre leaning mustard. The name is the fiddler crab; it's part of Kingdom Note's crustacean series, which also gave us a coconut crab and a tiger prawn, because of course it did. Some retailers file it as a green. It isn't, or at least mine isn't. It's gold-brown with a warm bias.
Tono & Lims Star Forming in the Montblanc 149 is the one I'd point a newcomer at if they wanted to understand what chromatic separation means. The body of the stroke is a caramel tan; the edges drift purple-brown. It's from the DEEEP SPACE collection, which is built around exactly that behaviour. Tono & Lims is a Japanese brand founded by Takashi Ono, made in partnership with Lim's Lab in South Korea — worth knowing if you care about where your ink comes from, because the answer is genuinely "both".
Ink Institute — Autumn Sounds Steal into My Day in the Scribo Love Letters sits between brown and red. Brick, rust, with darker edges where it dries down. It has the longest name in my collection and I'm not going to pretend that isn't part of the appeal.
The reds and the one that isn't quite
Sailor Afternoon Tea in the Nakaya Ryukyo is the brightest thing on the left page — a burnt orange-red, more terracotta than tomato. In a soft fine it's got real presence.
Lennon Tool Bar Red Beans in the Montblanc JFK goes the other way: deep raspberry, almost maroon in the heavy areas. Two reds that would never be mistaken for each other.
Greens, olives, and a disagreement
Lennon Tool Bar Ghost Plant in the Pelikan 140 broad is a muted, greyed sage that deepens towards forest where it sits thick. Restrained, which is not a word I'd use for much else on this spread.
Teranishi Emotional Olive in the Pelikan 400 Tortoiseshell is where my swatch and the official line part company, and I'd rather say so than pretend otherwise.
The ink comes from Teranishi's Guitar Taishō Roman Haikara line, made for the company's 105th anniversary. The collection takes its cues from the Taishō era, roughly 1912 to 1926 — haikara, "high collar", was the slang for the stylish Western influences arriving in Japan at the time. Most descriptions of Emotional Olive call it a pale yellow-green or a chartreuse, and plenty of reviewers find it too light to read comfortably.
My swab doesn't look like that. The pooled areas are solidly gold-brown, and the chartreuse only shows in the thin sections. Both readings are true — this is an ink with enormous shading range, and what you get depends entirely on how much of it lands on the paper. In an extra-fine, as I have it here, you'd see more of the pale end than this swatch suggests. It's a good reminder that a heavy swab is a portrait of an ink's ceiling, not its everyday behaviour.
Purples, and one lonely blue
Diamine Damson in the Pelikan M800 Green Demonstrator is the darkest purple I own — very nearly black in the swab, with the plum showing up properly only at the edges and in writing.
Troublemaker Golden Orchid in the Leonardo MZG 2.0 Galattica Universe is a clearer, mid-toned violet. The pen is a collaboration between Leonardo and Tailored Pen Company, in a blue-purple-orange resin with shimmer through it, and I'll admit the ink was chosen to match the barrel rather than the other way round.
Sailor × Poesie Bungu — Nyan Day Tuesday in the Sailor Wajima Bijou is the dusty one. Grey-mauve, low saturation, the sort of colour that looks unremarkable in a swab and then behaves beautifully in a medium nib.
Kitty Inkpot Misty Lighthouse in the Magna Carta Mag600 Golden Raden is a periwinkle blue-violet, and the flex nib gives it somewhere to pool and go deeper.
And then there's Sailor Lake Shikotsu in the Aurora Optima Caleidoscopio — the only unambiguous blue in fifteen pens. A clean mid denim. I'm not sure whether to be pleased about that or slightly concerned.
The greys
Kitty Inkpot — The clouds bring in Autumn colours in the Sey Chinkin Kurage is the palest thing on the spread: a warm, low-saturation taupe-grey. It's the ink most likely to be overlooked in a photograph and perhaps a little too light to be legible.
A note on reading these swatches
Everything here is on Tomoe River, and the swab bars are laid on heavily. That's deliberate — it shows the full range an ink is capable of — but it does exaggerate depth and any chromatic separation. The handwritten lines underneath each bar are the truer guide to what you'd actually get on the page. If a swatch and a written sample disagree, believe the writing.
Several of these are in the shop as 4ml samples, and more of them will be as I work through the catalogue. If there's one here you want a closer look at before committing, or you just want to argue with me about whether Uca arcuata is green, message me. I'm a collector first and I'd genuinely rather talk about ink than sell it.
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