I’ve been away from home for almost a month. Though I packed a lot of pens full of ink, I didn’t know I’d be here so long and didn’t pack enough ink in cartridge form to keep myself inked up (and didn’t want to hazard packing and lugging (a) bottle(s) of ink in my backpack for hours and counties of bus rides and walking.
While I was able to get some syringes quickly to refill my now-empty cartridges, I still needed INK to do it, so today I went back to the brick and mortar stationary store I found in town selling a sweet little selection of Kaweco fountain pens and procured a bunch of cartridges in different colors.
Colorful boxes of Kaweco ink cartridges and a bottle of art supply store black ink of dubious safety.
They don’t carry bottled ink, but the very lovely man who was there both today and the first time I visited recommended I go to the art supply store just a few short blocks away, I loved the way he recommended it as a good place/resource to know about, like he was a guide with an innate sense of what provisions I would likely need to keep in stock on my journey. I was super happy to come back and spend a little bit of money after the amount of time I spent last time just browsing and touching everything without contributing a nickel.
Unfortunately the art supply only had this lone bottle of ink marked as suitable for fountain pens. I was not feeling particularly trusting about this bottle actually being fountain-pen safe (and this thread on Fountain Pen Network confirms that even the manufacturer does not consider it guaranteed-safe for any fountain pens except their own specialty sketch pens even though it *is* water-based and NOT real “india ink”) so I might just take it back and go ahead and order something better and truly fountain-pen specific. I’d rather put the $12.75 (plus tax) towards something else. On the other hand, the chances of it really *harming* any pen I might put it in are probably low enough to go ahead and risk it for convenience’s sake. My Lamy Al-Star, for example, will probably be fine with it and not the absolute worst pen to chance it with. I’m sort of intrigued by the greyness of it in the original poster’s review. It’s also possible the ink is very different now in 2023 compared to 2008 when the review was posted. The packaging has changed, anyway; maybe that is not all.
However it pans out, I loved having an excuse to go into the art supply store; this bottle of ink was not the only thing I picked up there, and I’m sure I will keep all of those other things.