Pilot Iroshizuku Ajisai — 4ml Fountain Pen Ink Sample

Hue: Pilot describe Ajisai (hydrangea) as a blue-purple, and most retailer copy leads on the violet. My swatches read considerably more blue than that — a bright, saturated royal blue with only a faint violet lean in the written line. The purple shows up where the ink pools and dries, with edges going deep indigo-plum, but the writing itself is unmistakably blue. Worth knowing if you're buying it expecting a true blue-violet.

Shading: High. The dip-pen bar runs from pale cornflower where the ink is thin to full royal blue where it's loaded, and the drops show clear light-to-dark gradation across a single pool.

Sheen: None in the writing. The darker plum-toned edges on my heavy drops are concentration rather than a reflective sheen. Some reviewers report a trace of copper sheen in very large swabs on Tomoe River — I didn't get it here.

Shimmer: None.

Flow: Medium.

The interesting bit: Pilot launched Iroshizuku in December 2007 — "iro" (colour) and "shizuku" (droplet). Ajisai is 紫陽花, the hydrangea, which in Japan is the flower of the June rainy season and the reason temple gardens fill with visitors in the wettest month of the year. Its kanji read literally as "purple sun flower", which is a fair description of an ink that swatches blue and dries with violet at the edges. Real hydrangeas shift from blue to pink depending on the acidity of the soil they're grown in — a flower that refuses to settle on one colour, which is fitting for an ink people can't quite agree the colour of.

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.