Lennon Tool Bar Guardian Beasts Vol. 3 Shen Long - 4ml Fountain Pen Ink Sample

Hue: A deep, cool slate grey. The manufacturer and stockists describe it as a soft lavender grey with blue and violet undertones — on my swatches the violet lean is much subtler than that suggests, and only really shows in lighter washes and at the pale edges of a swab. In a written line it reads as a dark neutral-to-cool grey rather than a lavender. Worth knowing if you're buying it expecting a purple-grey.

Shading: Strong. Even in a plain line it drops from pale grey to near-charcoal, and in wet washes it separates into distinct light and dark bands. This is the ink's main character.

Sheen: None.

Shimmer: None.

Flow: Medium.

The interesting bit: 神龍 Shen Long — "Divine Dragon" — comes from Lennon Tool Bar's Guardian Beasts series, which takes as its subject the animal companions and attendants of the gods in Taiwanese folk religion rather than the deities themselves. Lennon Tool Bar's own note for this one is written in the dragon's voice: churning amid cloud and rain, soaring for millennia, and now coiled at the temple gates, quietly carrying the prayers of passing worshippers. It shares the release with the Tiger Guardian and with Thousand-Mile Eye and Wind-Tracking Ear, the two attendants of the sea goddess Mazu. Lennon Tool Bar itself is worth a mention: the company was founded in Tamsui, Taiwan in 2014, originally to promote indigo dyeing — a trade that thrived a century ago when Taiwan exported large quantities of dye material to Japan — and moved into fountain pen inks as a way of keeping those traditional colours in circulation. 

This is a hand-decanted 4ml sample vial from my own bottle.
Photos are my own swatches on Tomoe River Paper.
I'm a collector and I'm always happy to talk ink, so please message me if you have any questions.