The best fountain pen ink brands

A first bottle should be forgiving in two ways: it should behave on the cheap paper you already own, and it should rinse out without a fight when you want to change color. Serenity Blue is chosen for both.

It is a straightforward dye ink with no shimmer, no pigment and no unusual additives. That is exactly what you want while you are still learning which problems are the pen, which are the ink and which are the paper.

Waterman does not publish a drying time or a water-resistance figure for it, and neither does anyone else selling it, so we do not quote one.

A dry ink is not a defect. Less ink leaving the nib per centimeter of line means less ink for absorbent paper to wick sideways, which is why a dry ink on bad paper often looks sharper than a wet ink on good paper.

4001 is the reference point for that behavior. If you are stuck writing on photocopier paper or a school notebook, this is the pairing that has the best chance of staying crisp.

The trade is on good paper, where a dry ink can feel scratchy and looks thin next to something more saturated.

Iroshizuku is where most people discover that ink can be interesting. Kon-peki shades — the same stroke goes light where the ink pooled less and dark where it pooled more — and that variation is what makes handwriting look considered rather than printed.

It is a wet ink. On the 70 gsm paper in a supermarket notebook it will show through, and on the worst paper it will bleed. Pair it with 90 gsm or better and it behaves.

It costs several times what a bottle of everyday blue costs, and it will last you a year of daily writing regardless.

Diamine's proposition is volume for money. An 80 ml bottle is enough ink to fill a pen every week for a couple of years, at a price closer to a small bottle from a premium brand.

The range behaves like a standard dye ink should: reasonable flow, reasonable drying, no shimmer particles or pigment to complicate cleaning.

Sherwood Green is a dark, readable green rather than a bright one, which makes it usable for actual work rather than only for decoration.

The reason to keep a bottle of this is not the color. It is that a signed document, an address on an envelope or a note left on a windowsill survives contact with water, which ordinary dye inks do not.

Because the dye bonds to the paper rather than sitting on it, it also tends to feather less on cheap stock than its wetness would suggest.

The trade-off is cleaning. Inks that bond to cellulose also bond to the inside of a pen, so flush more often and do not leave it sitting in a pen you plan to ignore for a month.

Thirty milliliters is a sensible amount of ink for someone with one pen. It is months of writing, and it does not commit you to a color for years.

Perle Noire runs on the dry side for a black, which makes it a better companion for wet nibs and thin paper than most blacks are.

The same ink is available in cartridges, which is unusually convenient if you want to carry the color rather than only use it at a desk.

Pigment ink suspends solid particles rather than dissolving a dye, which is why it is opaque, why it is permanent, and why it will clog a pen left to dry out.

For drawing, for signatures, and for anything you want legible in twenty years, nothing else in a fountain pen comes close.

It demands discipline. Do not leave it in a pen you are not using, and flush thoroughly when you change ink.