TAG Stationery kyo-iro Stone Road of Gion — 4ml Fountain Pen Ink Sample

Hue: A muted, low-saturation grey-brown. Most reviewers describe it as a cool-toned grey-brown, but my swatches read warmer than that — an olive-tinged sepia, closer to old-photograph brown than to grey. The cool grey character only shows where the ink pools heavily; in the darkest concentrations it drops to a near-black charcoal. Worth knowing before you buy if you're after a true cool grey. TAG inks are made in small batches and colour can vary slightly between bottles.

Shading: Heavy. This is the ink's main event — a wide colour span that produces strong, sometimes quite abrupt shading. My swabs go from pale khaki through mid-sepia to near-black in a single pass. 

Sheen: None.

Shimmer: None.

Flow: Dry.

The interesting bit: Kyo-iro means "colours of Kyoto" — a series made by Takeda Jimuki for their TAG stationery shops, with each colour drawn from a specific place in the city. This one takes its name (祇園の石畳, Gion no Ishidatami) from the willow-lined, canal-side cobbled lane in the Shirakawa area of Gion, Kyoto's old entertainment district of wooden machiya townhouses, teahouses and geiko. The colour is doing something quite literal: the patchy light-to-dark shading is meant to read like wet paving stones. It also explains the box, which carries a maiko with a parasol.

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.