Pelikan 4001 Dark Green — 4ml Fountain Pen Ink Sample

Hue: A cool, blue-leaning forest green. Pelikan call it Dunkelgrün ("dark green"), and that holds on my swatches only where the ink pools — the muddler drops go deep pine to near-black. The dip-pen bar and the writing sample both read closer to a medium teal-green than a true dark green, which matches what most reviewers have said about it. If you're after a green-black, this isn't it.

Shading: Moderate. The bar lightens across the sweep and strokes darken noticeably where they end or overlap. More obvious in broader nibs.

Sheen: None. The wine-purple edging visible in my swatches is chromatic separation, not sheen — it's the dye splitting where the ink sits thickest, and it won't show in ordinary writing.

Shimmer: None.

Flow: Medium.

The interesting bit: The 4001 name is older than most fountain pens. From the late 1890s Günther Wagner began trademarking its most important inks with numbers — 2001, 3001, 4001, 5001 and later 6001 — simply so customers could ask for them by name in a catalogue that ran to seventeen pages of ink alone. Only 4001 survives today, albeit with a different composition from the original. Dark Green is a relative newcomer to that very old line: it arrived in April 2016, replacing Brilliant Green, and was released to match the barrel of the M120 Green-Black special edition — itself a reissue of the 1955 Pelikan 120 school pen. 

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.