Sailor Manyo Ayame — 4ml Fountain Pen Ink Sample

Hue: A soft grey-lilac to mauve, with dark forest green separating out wherever the ink pools. Sailor and most retailers describe Ayame as a green-grey base that shades to purple and grey — on my Tomoe River swatches it reads the other way round. The purple is the dominant colour in both the swab bar and the writing sample, and the green appears as dark bands and edges at the pooled margins rather than as the base tone. The ink looks near-black-green in the bottle.

Shading: Very high. This is the whole point of the ink — it doesn't just go light to dark, it separates into two different colours, lilac in the thin areas and deep green where the ink gathers. The swab drops show it clearly: purple centres ringed and banded with green.

Sheen: None.

Shimmer: None.

Flow: Dry.

The interesting bit: Ayame is the Japanese iris, and the Manyo line takes its names from the Man'yōshū, the oldest surviving anthology of Japanese poetry. Of its roughly 4,500 poems, around 1,500 mention plants or flowers. Ayame arrived in spring 2022 as part of the third Manyo release — a set of four dual shading inks (Ayame, Hinoki, Koke and Fuji) formulated to break into a second colour in areas of high and low concentration. There's a nice joke buried in the name: irises are the archetypal blue-purple flower, and Sailor gave you an ink that looks green-grey until you let it pool, at which point the purple turns up.

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.