Ink Review - Pilot Tsuwairo Black
At this point in time, I have almost two shoe boxes filled with fountain pen ink. Funnily enough, until just a few days ago, I didn't have what many would consider the "basic of basics" - a standard, no-nonsense, black ink.
So why get one now?
Recently, overall usability has been a big deal for me. Fountain pen inks are nice, but many of them only work well on "premium paper" and are really finnicky everywhere else. Even if I'm writing at home at my desk, I still have to be careful about hand placement so that skin oils don't get onto the page and the ink starts to feather once I get to the bottom.
For everyday use, you need inks that are what I call "bulletproof." They work on sub-par paper, are resistant to water, dry relatively quickly ... so when you use them, you can just use them, without making a big fuss about it.
For this purpose, I already have blue and blue-black inks that I like (Platinum Blue-Black and Sailor Souboku, respectively). So I thought I might as well round out the "classic trio" of fountain pen inks with a regular black.
The Tsuwairo series from Pilot is relatively new (released in 2022). As far as black "bulletproof" inks go, Platinum's Carbon Black is probably the most famous one. I chose Tsuwairo because it was cheaper, comes in a smaller bottle1 , and hasn't been reviewed online as much. I wanted to test it out. Below is a writing sample.
The ink comes down pretty dark and has a matte finish once dry (no sheening), which is pretty standard for pigment inks. I found that it dried relatively quickly - I'd say the writing is "mostly safe" after 15 seconds and "completely safe" after 25.2
There was some very limited shading - in the bottom text (below the grid and the dry times) you can see some parts that are slightly lighter than others, depending on where the ink pooled. I did this writing with a Sailor Hocoro F. The top text was written with a Pilot iro-utsushi F. Both of these are dip pens. The Hocoro probably is closer to what the ink would look like when flowing through a fountain pen.3
Right on the package, it says that this ink doesn't feather easily and is lightfast. The paper I used for this test comes from a Daiso notepad, with surprisingly decent quality - however,"regular" dye-based inks tend to feather on this paper when I get to the bottom half (due to those annoying hand oils). With this ink, I saw no feathering at all.4
The lightfastness test will have to wait, but since its pigment-based, this ink should also be very water resistant. I already knew that it was from checking existing reviews online, but of course, I wanted to try for myself. Below is a close-up of the bottom text - I put some water on the left side and let it sit for a few minutes. There was no lifting whatsoever.
After finishing that test, I also decided to completely submerge the whole page in a water bath for what must've been 20 or maybe 30 minutes. This is how the writing sample looked once it was dry again:
So, yeah. I think think this ink comes pretty close to being 100% waterproof. There also wasn't any smearing when I used a highlighter on top of it (not in the picture, separate test).
Overall, I am very happy with what I got. Tsuwairo Black might not be an "exciting color", but I like how dark it is. Due to its properties, I'll probably be able to take notes at work, on the go, etc without having to be careful about anything except for maybe the dry time (but 15 seconds is very reasonable). Since it's waterproof, I'm also looking forward to using it with my watercolors. Can't let it get on my clothes though! Once it's on there, it's probably never coming out again. So handle with care.
The ink also came with a warning to not use it in specific pens or converters. Rule of thumb seems to be to not use it in pens that can't be disassembled completely for cleaning if necessary. I don't to expect to run into any problems with regular use, but there could be some clogging issues if the pen is left unused for too long.
Footnotes
Because I already have so many inks, I now tend to opt for smaller bottles or cartridges whenever they're available, even when the calculated price per milliliter is higher than in a bigger bottle. Smaller bottles and cartridges just save space, and I want to reduce potential waste as much as possible.↩
It changes a bit depending on how you test. You can see a slight smear on the "20 second" cross, but here I swiped with a slightly sweaty finger. For the other ones, I made sure to dry off my finger before swiping. That's why I'd say that for slight contact, you probably don't have to worry about noticeable smears after 15 seconds.↩
I'll update the post with some additional samples once I put the ink in a pen.↩
I might also update this post with some more tests on even shittier paper in the future.↩