pen ink Archives - Time & Ink

Best Blue Fountain Pen Inks: 10 Bottles I Have Used and Ranked

Ellen Ashford · September 1, 2026

Best Blue Fountain Pen Inks: 10 Bottles I Have Used and Ranked Blue is the most crowded shelf in fountain pen ink, and most of the differences that matter are invisible in a swatch. A colour that looks gorgeous painted on Rhodia can feather into a smudge on a photocopier’s paper, take ninety seconds to … Read more

Waterproof Fountain Pen Inks That Actually Write Well

Ellen Ashford · July 22, 2026

Waterproof Fountain Pen Inks That Actually Write Well

Every January, when I sit down to break in a fresh notebook, I’m reminded of a mistake that cost me an entire page of research notes: I once assumed that any fountain pen ink would simply become waterproof if given enough drying time. That assumption turned out to be badly, expensively wrong. I’d filled a … Read more

Ink Sample Services: How I Test 50 Inks Without Buying 50 Bottles

Ellen Ashford · July 19, 2026

Ink Sample Services: How I Test 50 Inks Without Buying 50 Bottles

Here’s the myth I want to dismantle right away: that a swatch photo tells you anything reliable about how an ink will actually behave in your hand. It doesn’t. A few years into this hobby, I dropped money on a full 50ml bottle of a heavily praised ink purely because the online swatch showed a … Read more

Getting Fountain Pen Ink Off Your Hands, Clothes, and Desk

Ellen Ashford · July 13, 2026

Getting Fountain Pen Ink Off Your Hands, Clothes, and Desk

Early on, I tried to blot a fresh puddle of Diamine Oxblood off my desk with the sleeve of the sweater I happened to be wearing, and I learned two things in the same ten seconds: fountain pen ink does not care about your clothing choices, and hesitation is the whole problem. Since that morning … Read more

Ink That Ghosts vs Ink That Shows Through: My Notebook Trials

Ellen Ashford · July 8, 2026

Ink That Ghosts vs Ink That Shows Through: My Notebook Trials

Don’t trust a journal entry until you’ve flipped the page. That shadowy double of yesterday’s handwriting rising up through today’s paper is the single most common complaint I field from other people who write daily with a dip or cartridge pen — and it fooled me for years before I finally sorted out what was … Read more

Shimmer and Sheen Inks: Beautiful but Here Is What They Do to Your Pen

Ellen Ashford · June 27, 2026

Shimmer and Sheen Inks: Beautiful but Here Is What They Do to Your Pen

Here is the myth I need to bust straight away: shimmer ink is not simply “sheen with sparkle added,” and treating it that way is exactly how you end up scrubbing metallic grit out of a converter on a Saturday you’d rather have spent writing. That deep, shifting purple I once uncapped for the first … Read more