Hello. I'm Kirst, and I am the entire operation.
I'm a fountain pen and ink collector. It began as a hobby, became a passion, and has now settled somewhere closer to an obsession. I have made peace with this. My shelves have not.
What I love most about ink is the stories. Almost every bottle has one buried in it somewhere — a place, a person, a bit of history, a name that means something quite different in its original language. I spend an unreasonable amount of time chasing those stories down, and they end up in my listings, because I think knowing where an ink came from makes writing with it more fun.
What you'll find here
4ml sample vials, hand-decanted from my own bottles. Not stock bought in to resell — my actual collection, the bottles sitting on my actual shelf. Four millilitres is enough to fill more than one pen, swatch it properly, and still have some left to splatter about.
Every swatch photo you see is mine, done on Tomoe River paper. If what I got on paper doesn't match what the manufacturer's marketing promises, I'll say so in the listing. I'd rather you knew what was actually arriving than be sold by the description and let down by the vial.
And where I'm not sure about something — dry time, water resistance, whether an edition really was as limited as the box claims — I leave it out rather than repeat something I can't stand behind. There's a great deal of confidently wrong information about ink on the internet. I try not to add to it.
Why samples, and not bottles
Honestly? Because I can't part with the bottles. I have tried. I am, unrepentantly, an ink hoarder.
Samples turned out to be the answer to a problem I didn't know I had: a way to share a collection that had long since outgrown any reasonable person's ability to use it, without actually losing any of it. You get to try something before committing to a full bottle. I get to keep my shelves. Everybody wins, except possibly my bank.
The money bit
I should be straight with you: I'm not making money out of this. Some samples earn me a few pence, some are technically a loss. This was never a business plan. It's a way of sharing something I've been very fortunate to collect, and of meeting people who care about ink as much as I do — which, it turns out, is rather a lot of you.
Come and talk ink
The best part of all of this has been the messages. People asking what pairs well with what, whether a shimmer will clog their fine nib, what on earth to do about a green they've fallen out of love with. I have opinions on all of it and I'm always happy to share them.
So please do get in touch. Ask me anything — about an ink you're eyeing up, one you already own, or one you can't find anywhere. If I have it, I'll tell you what I really think of it. If I don't, I'll probably go and look it up anyway, because that's how I ended up here in the first place.
And the name?
There's a story behind that one, involving a pen show, a city that wasn't mine, and considerably more purchases than I had any intention of declaring. It's over on the blog.